ALAN MARKFIELD Enlarge Image

Chronicle

Ever since Marvel Comics’ renaissance in the ’60s, superhero stories have tilted towards imagining what it would really be like for ordinary people to gain fantastic powers.
   
Those pioneering Marvel stories — featuring such characters as the Fantastic Four and Spider-Man — did not imagine too hard: the plots remained preposterous, the personal details often wildly melodramatic. And for all the thoughtful, gritty revisionism of Alan Moore’s and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen (1986), that comics milestone was likewise miles from genuine realism.
   
Hence the room for a film like Chronicle in contemporary fantasy. The movie concerns three Seattle high-school friends who find something not of this Earth at the bottom of a deep, dark hole in the woods.
   
We never learn just what’s down there, but that’s irrelevant. What’s important is how these young people subsequently discover they possess telekinetic powers, the scope of which becomes gradually clear.
   
This leads to some of the movie’s most inspired scenes, featuring the teenagers ribbing each other and pulling pranks with their newfound abilities. Also uproariously accurate is when the boys are climbing down that hole and Andrew (Dane DeHaan) expresses the kind of concern a real teenager would have: "Matt! You’re my ride home!"
   
What’s unfortunate about Chronicle is how other moments reflect a surprising lack of narrative assurance, comparatively — as when Andrew wonders if their powers don’t have greater potential and Matt replies, "Why, what else is there?" as if nothing greater has occurred to him. The boys’ discovery of their new gifts is also too abrupt and rushed, and the non-reaction of one prank victim is completely unconvincing.
   
In other words, the film’s central conceit — that this is a story of how actual super-powered teens might actually act — only sometimes succeeds. The film’s style, using the documentary-like "lost footage" approach, is meant to lend a sense of realism to the fantastic, but there’s never a sense of the ever-present camera — mostly held by Andrew — being convincingly integrated into the action. The problem here is that supposedly "real" footage looks far too professional for a diverse array of video and cellphone cameras and, for that matter, has been too conveniently cut together.
   
But then, this style is fashionable and, more importantly, cheaper to produce. That pervasively phony feeling throughout Chronicle unfortunately weakens the often engaging fantasy. If only the filmmakers hadn’t tried quite so hard to be "realistic."