Thursday, March 29, 2012

Chronicle

Last night I watched "Chronicle," which has been the teen favorite at the start of the 2012 year. It has garnered pretty decent reviews with an 83% on Rotten Tomatoes. I understand why teens have been seeing it but I do not understand these positive reviews. I am a fan of the found footage steady cam movies like "The Blair Witch Project," "Paranormal Activity," "Cloverfield," and even "Quarantine" was fun. There was absolutely no reason for this movie to be done with a hand held camera. I think the premise of the film was cool and was its main asset. However, the found footage from multiple different cameras, not just one, feels like you are watching your friend play a bad video game. There is absolutely no character development at all. It just begins and goes real fast and the director expects you to care about these people. He really gives us no reason to. They are not necessarily real likable guys. The main problem I have with this movie is that a lot of things happen and there is no reason or explanation for it. These teenagers get infected or exposed to these things that make them telekinetic and we have no explanation on why this happens. This kid who struggles with life at home just randomly decides he wants to take a camera everywhere he goes and chronicle everything. Why is he doing this?!? He has to have the camera on at all times and refuses to let anyone turn it off. SPOILER ALERT: Towards the end, this kid goes crazy and starts wrecking havoc and killing everyone, even his closest friends. We are never given an explanation for why he does this. Sure, he has a tough home life with a drunken father but seriously? Also, the idea to think this kid is going to carry this camera everywhere even when he is robbing stores and murdering people. He is literally convicting himself constantly. The movie is completely ridiculous and I guess that is okay but normally with stupidity in movies there also comes at least a dumb explanation for it. The movie is only 1hr 20 minutes but probably is only intriguing for about fifteen minutes. The climax is not intense mainly because we do not care about these kids and the people this guy is killing seem less like people and more like CGI images you kill in a James Bond video game. It may be short but do not waste your time. It gets few stars for an interesting premise that is poorly executed and falls flat on its face.

2 out of 5 Stars

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