Chronicle
Good News - This is just under 10x better than Green Lantern
Bad News - Green Lantern managed to get just under 10x the budget of Chronicle
What is this world coming to...
Well hopefully this will wind up becoming good big news, since Chronicle is shaping up to becoming the first big hit of 2012, and rightly so.
The reasoning this film works is plain and simple. It takes your typical origin story, strips everything away from it, places three characters in the middle of it, and builds up it's own story from there on in. You make no reservations, there are no setting ups for sequels and crossovers. It's a singular self contained story, and a very well built one at that.
Acting is very good, mostly built from new comers, they all have well built legitimate chemistry, so much so that some of the lines must of been improvised on set, and a lot of the best scenes are from the characters interacting with each other. This film takes a character over spectacle approach to itself, which is essential due to its budget. The film smartly places characters with one another to show their relationships build and even better, conflict rising. The film takes a very subtle path to setting up it's plot...
...which leads to one of (if not only one of) my problems...
When the film is slightly less subtle, you begin to roll your eyes. The main character we follow winds up having a dying mother and a drunk abusive dad, which is about the most cliche the film gets. Obviously the scenes are well acted, and the scenes involving the father are suitably shocking and brutal portrayals of real domestic violence which plays to the films credit. However there come scenes where you so the dad call his son a loser, and his final scene is very much over played that it comes off more forced. In a lesser film, this would be a particular highlight, but in this film, it just comes across very weak compared to the best of everything else.
The only other problems I had where of course very minor, the budget is small so the special effects do look weak so some scenes detach you from the film, but most special effects shots are so small or shot in a way you can't make out everything. My only other problem might bother more people is that the whole found footage think sometimes is very stretched. There is a character simply added so they can establish that the film can have different camera angles, and it's very forced.
Yet, the whole POV idea of the film is also pulled off amazingly in a lot of the scenes, sometimes you have very simple scenes slowly building tension just because it does such smart things with the camera work. It's smart when it's done well, it's frustrating when it struggles to apply it genuinely into the films diegesis, but is never a film breaker
This film is written by John Landis' son, Max Landis, this is an interesting fact I came across and looking back on the film and really thought back on it that this might become as influential as An American Werewolf in London. Sure there are literally no connections between the two, but I feel that this will do to the Superhero genre that An American Werewolf did to Werewolf sub-genre. It takes what originally made the genre so good an applies it to modern day principles, adds characters and continually offers a mix between fun and joy and dramatic thrills. Just keep that in mind in about 10 years time when a new generation of film lovers appear
Not forgetting the new golden boy of Fox who's getting offered all sorts of big budget films now. Josh Trank, who puts everything he has into the film, and really pulls out a film that could of come across very cheesy into a well made thriller that is offering something you've not seen before on screen.
Without a doubt in my mind you should see Chronicle. Come the end of the year, and we see top lists being pulled together, the superhero film that will get top billing won't be the half cooked Spiderman re-slap, it won't be that big kahuna burger by Marvel that is The Avengers, and it probably won't be Ghost Rider 2
. It will be Chronicle* it offers everything you could want from a film, and hopefully it will make huge waves in the term of shaping the genre and possibly some aspects of the film industry.
9/10
*Keeping in mind, Batman does have a lot of hype that could work against it
All countries
Argentina
Austria
Belgium
Brazil
Bulgaria
Chile
China
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Czech Republic
Estonia
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Finland
Greece
Hong Kong
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Iceland
Indonesia
Ireland
Israel
India
Latvia
Lithuania
Malaysia
New Zealand
Norway
Philippines
Poland
Portugal
Romania
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Singapore
South Africa
South Korea
Sweden
Switzerland
Taiwan
Thailand
Turkey
Ukraine
United Arab Emirates
Commenting on the other slow paced film you mentioned, I love Adventureland. Anyways, I have this from Netflix and will be watching it Sunday night. I fully expect to be a part of that 1/10th, which is obvious if you knew that this was probably the one film left from 2011 that I think could dethrone Super 8 as my favorite film from 2011. I know that's some lofty expectations, but oh well.
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