Reviewing The Situation - Chronicle
And to think there was a time when I was excited to see another comic-book movie...
Comic-book movies and found footage films have been incredibly popular of late. Josh Trank's Chronicle has a foot in both of camps. That's it better than pretty much all of the movies in either sub-genre marks Trank out as a young director worth paying attention to* and Chronicle a picture worth paying to see.
High school student Andrew Detmer (Dane DeHaan) might as well carry a sign around with him saying 'Victim'. With a terminally ill mother and a permanently drunk dad (Michael Kelly), Andrew's home life is only marginally worse than his time in class, where he's targeted by bullies and ignored by all the girls except the cheerleaders who ask him to stop filming them because it's "kinda creepy".
In lieu of friends, Andrew spends the bulk of his time with his somewhat cooler cousin Matt (Alex Russell). It's while attending a party together that the family members, together with the impossibly popular class president Steve (Michael B Jordan), encounter a... thing, wedged underground. From this moment onwards, the three teens' lives will never be the same. In fact, they will be downright super.
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