So Chronicle is a movie made from the perspective of a single camera throughout most of it. The first character we're introduced to is Andrew Detmer, a kid from Seattle who's decided to start recording his entire life. Like a self-made reality show.
Anyways, Andrew's mother is dying and his father has decided to take a nosedive off the deep-end in response. As such he's become an abusive jerk. Or maybe he was always like this, I don't know.
So Andrew goes to school with his cousin, Matt Garetty. Andrew records his life at school and we find that he's bullied there.
In 2012? Seriously? Nerds being nerds is cause for bullying? Maybe Seattle is different from the rest of the country.
I don't know, I've never been there. Or maybe the world hasn't changed as much as I would have thought.
So Andrew gets invited to a party by Matt to try and bring him out of his shell, but some morons at the party decided to mess with him for trying to document his life. So he leaves the party and sits in the yard doing nothing for a while.
I like how the film moves from run-of-the-mill drudgery to whoosh-crikey awesomeness fairly quickly.
So they develop super-powers and start honing them to perfection. They develop a close bond, as anyone who developed superpowers with or near someone else probably would.
So they enter into the school talent competition to show off their powers as a magic trick, and Andrew becomes extremely popular overnight. His cousin, Matt films it all, along with another student from their school who also films stuff.
So afterwards, Andrew gets drunk at a party and proceeds to vomit. Afterwards he's treated just as bad, if not worse then he was before.
What follows is a series of events that put Andrew through a series of hardships that are entirely of his own making. If he'd spent any time talking to his friends, the people who can best relate to being a godlike entity with tons of power going through highschool in Seattle Washington. Seriously, there are two other people in the world who know what's going on and he completely ignores them!
While Matt could have been a little less accusatory towards Andrew, Andrew could have solved all of the problems in this entire movie if he'd spent more time talking about the stuff he's going through with Steve and Matt.
Or even if he'd looked around on the internet, the repository of all the worlds knowledge. You know, like every teenager in this day and age does!
Ugh.... Anyways, while I did really like the film, it got a little wonky towards the end. While it kind of makes up for it with how awesome the climax is, the way they got there is highly questionable.
To be perfectly honest, it seems like they wrote a really awesome climax, but forgot to figure out how to lead into it, so they just derailed all of the characters so they could serve it. Not that it's a bad climax, it's entertaining to watch, and is about the only time that it actually seems like a real movie rather than a student film project. The problem is that the way they got there isn't entirely believable.
I can think of a hundred ways the movie could have ended better, but only one of them is funny.
All they need is Nick Fury and Charles Xavier. Fury to whip them into line and Xavier to teach them how to use their mutant/whatever powers.
Hold on, I've got a script treatment to write.....
To me, personally it seemed like they just wanted to get to the awesome climax and forgot to make the characters get into the mindset for it in some sort of believable way.
So now to the special effects. For the most part they're really good. The flying looks fairly realistic, but the green-screening for one of the skyscraper scenes looks like they laid a satellite picture of Seattle behind the actors and didn't bother adding any depth to it. The buildings never shift around the way they would in real life if you were actually filming in a city, as opposed to a set in South Africa.
So all in all, it was a good movie I suppose. I mean while it was good it was really good, but the ending wasn't how I'd have figured it would have finish off.
I give it a 7.7* rating. It loses a lot of points for throwing its characters off the rails towards the end, but gains some back for how awesome the climax was.
So, I'll see you next week with To Kill a Mockingbird!
No comments:
Post a Comment