Chronicle (2012)
★★½ — Chronicle (2012)
There's a moment in Chronicle where three teenagers are messing about above the clouds, racing each other through the sky, laughing their heads off, and you think: yes, this is it. This is the film I wanted. It captures something genuinely rare in the superhero genre, that giddy, disbelieving joy of suddenly being able to do something impossible. For a while, Chronicle is really something.
The setup is simple and smart. Three high school lads stumble across a mysterious object buried in the ground and wake up the next morning with telekinetic powers. One of them, Andrew, has been filming his life on a handheld camera, and the found-footage conceit slots in naturally here. These aren't polished heroes. They're kids doing what kids would actually do: moving LEGO bricks with their minds, pranking strangers in supermarkets, working out how far they can throw a baseball. The early scenes have a scrappy, lived-in energy that most superhero films would kill for. The awkward social dynamics feel real. The thrill of the abilities feels earned rather than handed out.
But here's the problem. As their powers grow, the film's confidence starts to wobble. The third act makes a hard turn toward chaos and destruction, and somewhere in that turn, the character work gets left behind. Andrew's descent is the heart of the story, and the performance is committed, genuinely good in places, but the script keeps things frustratingly surface-level. We get ego, we get rage, we get an abusive home life sketched in broad strokes. What we don't get is the slow, uncomfortable psychological unravelling that the premise is crying out for. It's the difference between showing someone becoming a monster and actually making you understand it.
The found-footage approach, clever as it is at the start, becomes a real liability by the end. There's a particular kind of exhaustion that sets in when shaky cam is deployed during action sequences, and Chronicle hits that wall hard. The final confrontation, which should feel enormous and devastating, is often just disorienting. You're squinting at the screen trying to work out what's happening rather than feeling any of it. I had a similar frustration with Hardcore Henry, where a gimmick that works brilliantly in short bursts becomes genuinely wearing over a full feature. Chronicle doesn't push it quite that far, but it's a close-run thing.
What's left when the dust settles is a film that had the bones of something special and didn't quite trust itself to see it through. The concept, a grounded, character-driven take on how power corrupts teenagers who are already emotionally volatile, is still compelling. Years on, it still feels like an angle the genre hasn't properly cracked. But Chronicle blinks at the crucial moment, trades psychological depth for spectacle, and ends up in "hero versus villain showdown" territory that could have come from any number of bigger-budget, lesser-ideas productions.
It's not bad. I want to be clear about that. There's real tension in the middle section, the performances are solid across the board, and the whole thing is put together with more care than you might expect from a found-footage genre film made on a modest budget. It's worth your time once. But once is probably enough, because there isn't much to turn over in your mind afterwards. The ideas evaporate almost as soon as the credits roll.
Two and a half stars. A missed opportunity, but an interesting one.
Rating: ★★½ | Year: 2012 | Watched: 2025-10-07
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
Stream: Disney Plus
Rent: Apple TV Store · Rakuten TV · Amazon Video · Google Play Movies
Buy: Apple TV Store · Rakuten TV · Amazon Video · Google Play Movies
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi
Watch in the US
Rent: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Buy: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Physical: Amazon US
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