To ask yourself "what would you do?" Is probably not the best you can do because, to be honest as we should be, having an extra gift, extra to the ones that we already have, many human beings on this planet would go after someone for revenge or try to find a way to benefit from this new gift. The success of a film like “Chronicle” relies on the power to talk about common things but in the language of a fantastic film.
Three boys with different, contrasting personalities get together when involuntarily they acquire the ability to master telekinesis. This turns them into something less than invincible, as if during adolescence you realize you can achieve your own ideas and feel a sense that you can succeed at everything that we do.
A refined success is achieved when we discover, little by little and through the visual chronicle (also reflected by the title of the film) that one of them takes that feeling of invincibility to extremes…to which others may take it too. A victim of bullying and home abuse, he will take the role, not of the hero he thinks he is, but of a spiteful avenger, who makes people pay the mistakes of western society.
The situation becomes much more interesting when we see that these weapons deployed by Josh Trank and Max Landis, director and writer respectively, recreated in the mentioned language of the fantastic movies (a trio of invincible guys) are used to tell the story of two traumas unfortunately common among the U.S. student society. First the bullying then the revenge of the clueless: video recording, the statement of the reasons, the shooting on campus, and grenades at the mall.
Something Carrie (EUA, 1976) also suggested, although that movie was set in the horror genre. "Chronicle" then takes on an almost didactic tone, but more focused on the entertainment film genre. However, there are two more things to thank this movie for.
The first is its special effects: if it didn’t have the effects it has, a wave of laughter’s would invade the room. The second, a rearranged video footage to tell the story.
The sequence at the Space Needle (everything happens in Seattle), in which the shots multiply themselves to make the telekinesis of one of the characters look more vivid and intense and we are left to wonder: how did they achieve this? From the beginning, we discover that the film is made from multiple cameras shots, videos that join together here in a mind that sees all, which in this case is our mind, through the mean of the film screen.
Failures however, are evident. First, the format idea was about revolutionizing, but it fails in that it lacks of communication: if told with a real language and a basic assembly, this story would have turned out to be, not only more powerful, but more exciting and of course able to go deeper into the issues of abuse, of suicidal revenge and extreme surveillance.
Furthermore, the storytelling with a single camera is something that not many would like. Linked to this problem is the fact that there are sequences that, even in the tone of a sci-fi film, turn out to be quite unlikely, thus difficult to accept and, consequently, quite pointless.
Writers: Max Landis (screenplay), Max Landis (story), and 1 more credit »
Stars: Dane DeHaan, Alex Russell and Michael B. Jordan
No comments:
Post a Comment