Series: Week in geek

Chronicle's found-footage fetish weakens its superhero powers

There are too many handheld cameras flying around in Josh Trank's film, which takes the found-footage genre too far
All-powerful cameras ... Josh Trank's superhero movie Chronicle sticks too faithfully to the found-footage format

It's easy to forget that District 9, Neill Blomkamp's part-mockumentary-style science-fiction thriller about life in a Johannesburg slum inhabited by stranded aliens, was ostensibly a found-footage film – largely because the South African film-maker dispensed with the format whenever it became inconvenient. Chronicle, the new found-footage superhero movie which has been picking up some degree of hype in the blogosphere, conversely finds itself hamstrung and ultimately strangled by its determination to stick faithfully to the genre's rules.

  1. Chronicle
  2. Production year: 2012
  3. Countries: Rest of the world, UK, USA
  4. Cert (UK): 12A
  5. Runtime: 83 mins
  6. Directors: Josh Trank
  7. Cast: Alex Russell, Anna Wood, Ashley Hinshaw, Dane DeHaan, Michael B Jordan, Michael Kelly
  8. More on this film

This means that everything you see on screen must have been filmed in real time by someone involved in the events depicted, or drawn from convenient CCTV footage, then edited together later. Fine if one is talking about a single camera Paranormal Activity-style set-up: not so believable when the characters are flying around the world and using their newfound telekinetic powers to wreak havoc with their immediate surroundings, as ends up happening rather entertainingly in Chronicle.

There are myriad moments, particularly towards the film's denouement, where director Josh Trank ought to have accepted either a gap in the narrative or a shift to a more conventional storytelling technique. He does neither, and we end up thinking about the unfeasibility of the set-up more than the events taking place on screen, which is never a good thing.

It's a pity because there is potentially an excellent non-found-footage (or perhaps semi-found-footage) movie in here somewhere. The film intelligently explores the inevitable graduation of real-world characters who inhabit a universe in which superpowers exist into superhero and supervillain in a manner which echoes but never plagiarises films such as Unbreakable, or even The Incredibles. There's also a notable Akira influence.

Max Landis's (son of John) screenplay centres on three high school friends who discover a mysterious crystal in a hole in the ground in the woods conveniently close to a teenage rave which they have all been attending. Slowly they begin to realise that they have been gifted with the ability to manipulate their environment, Dr Manhattan style. Geeky Andrew, who is bullied by just about everyone around him, including his abusive dad, begins chronicling the development of the trio's powers using his new video camera.

This works superbly for scenes in which the three, who by this point have formed a sort of exclusive superhero club, are exploring their skills in isolated locations, but somewhere along the line it was decided to shift into a more expansive and ambitious narrative. Hence, we are thrown into a bizarre universe in which 90 per cent of human beings seem to be obsessed with amateur film-making and off-screen voices make unlikely comments excusing the even more unlikely ubiquitous presence of video cameras during key scenes. This can get pretty irritating after a while: even the idiot cameraman in Cloverfield had a reasonably good excuse to keep filming while chaos erupted all around him (the footage would presumably have been worth a fortune should he have survived). In Chronicle, not five minutes of the film passes without the arrival onscreen of yet another camera-toting individual.

Trank is being touted as the man to resurrect the Fantastic Four franchise on the big screen for studio 20th Century Fox following his work here and it's easy to see why. Chronicle's dreamlike special effect sequences fizz with genuine kinetic energy and imagination, and to be fair the found-footage format is a strong contributory factor. As a superhero origins movie it is a surprisingly original and daring take on a tried and tested formula. It's just a pity that a few misguided creative decisions have left it such a flawed work.

I'd been hoping that Chronicle, which is out in the UK on 1 February and in the US not long after, was the year's first decent superhero flick, but it seems there's an inherent clash between the claustrophobic cage of the found-footage format and the anything-goes nature of the comic-book universe. Still, if you can ignore the clunky generic furniture, it might just be worth checking out.

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