yeah man… shake the camera some more, looks more intense…
it’s somewhat a feat in itself that a clever stylistic innovation (or gimmick: take your pick) has traversed the fad-strewn wastelands of popular culture to arrive at recurrent, semi-credible genre (or has it?), but perhaps the greater challenge any ‘found-footage’ film will face is traversing the equally precarious terrain of its own design. josh trank’s shaky-cam-superhero-flick chronicle embodies the dilemma in a nutshell — is facile authenticity really worth the boxed-in borders imposed of its premise?
probably not so much when your film reeks of scaled blockbuster ambition, but trank attempts to compact his brimming origins tale into modest indie form regardless, even though the set-up has enough invention of its own to excuse a proper cinematic treatment. particularly the film’s antagonist andrew — akin to de palma’s carrie re-devised from comic-book lore — is worthy of far greater characterization than the method can afford him, but is reduced to a mish-mash of social-outcast tropes and camera proximity instead.
trank wants a slice of both worlds, and subsequently chronicle becomes a work of frustrating self-description. with every trip to the outskirts of his device, trank has to remind us how we arrived there, validating the camera’s presence at each turn. every angle requires an explanation: andrew’s answer for the sudden boost in picture quality, those sweeping overhead tracking shots attributed to his new-found proficiency in telekinetic cinematography, whole characters introduced solely for the provision of alternate camera angles. all of which point to trank’s deep-seated desire to make a legit, polished action-movie. i wish he had just done a blomkamp, ditched the gimmick halfway through and balls-out gone for it.
chronicle seems to work best when its core-cast are just goofing off with a camera-at-hand; attesting to that persistent, popular streak of faux-doc/comedy marriages. the suspense never fares quite as well, with trank jump-cutting his way through the film’s more tense sequences with only the rare moment of creepy silence punctuating the pace. as a coup of economy, chronicle is undoubtedly an achievement of sorts; a firm testament to the potential of shoestring budgets and hybrid-mediums, but view that shit on strict cinematic terms — which i can’t shake the sense trank is secretly begging for — and there’s scant justification for its worth.
trailer here.
