MovieChat Forums > Chronicle (2012) Discussion > I was AMAZED at how much I disliked it.....

I was AMAZED at how much I disliked it...am I alone?


I like superhero movies; I like high-school dramas. I'm down with the found footage technique, though I think it's over-rated. I watched this film with a friend who has similar tastes. We kept cringing, and around the beer pong scene, were actually curling up on the couch in physical suffering over how much this movie sucked. I really feel like I'm close enough to the target demographic...although apparently I'm just getting out of touch.

It's like the screenwriters designed the characters--emo loser, philosophical type, and popular jock--and then hired whoever wrote the MTV remake of Skins to write all three of them. All three characters talked the same way, all the time. Matt's character in particular was the mostly poorly written "philosophical type" I've ever seen in a High School movie; he had no insights and could rarely form an articulate sentence. Andrew's character arc had some promise; his home life was genuinely disturbing, but having it end with him hurling school buses and patrol cars through the air was the ultimate cop-out to generic action, strangely anti-climactic amidst all of the effects.

In-as-much as the movie has a "message," it seems to be that if you're an abused, disturbed teenager, letting out your anger by killing hundreds of people doesn't make you a bad person because after all, you're an abused and disturbed teenager. Imagine this: a movie about one of the Columbine killers which ends with one of their friends in Tibet saying, "you're not a bad person. I'll do better. I'll help people..." Of course he's a bad person, and so is Andrew. The script is so under-baked when it comes to morality and motivation that it rams down our throats the idea that Andrew's actions are somehow inevitable and more his friends fault than his own, since they didn't love him in the way that he wanted.

Two scenes I liked: playing at the store with their powers (the shopping cart, etc.), and when Andrew beats up the bullies, there's a the moment when he's twirling their inert bodes, possible their corpses, around on the pavement, almost using their hair as paintbrushes to smear the blood on the street. Now THAT was compelling sh-t, most disturbing image in the movie by far.

I dunno...I guess the point of this post is to ask a simple question: Did anyone else just really basically hate the movie, mostly because of how annoying and one dimensional the characters were? Or am I just completely missing something?



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[deleted]

WHAT? The CGI effects were cheap as cheapness itself.

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Victims, aren't we all?

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[deleted]

The movie was basically just the guys goofing around, doing stupid stuff. Pretty much the entire movie felt like a prologue that just wouldn't get to the point. Yeah, I understand what they were trying to do; make a "realistic" movie about what would "really" happen if teens had powers (ie play around until one goes crazy and tries to kill the others). That doesn't make me like it, and I could've just came up with that just by daydreaming.

I understand character development and it can't be all action, but damn. So much of the movie could've been cut out without losing a single thing. It wasn't even character development, just them dicking around. Like I said, the whole movie felt like a prologue.

Also, the found footage felt like nothing but a gimmicky ploy. Even more than it usually does. Even the main character can't give an answer as to why he's filming, aside from it's in the script. Add in the fact that often the camera was saved at implausible times (for no reason other than events wouldn't be in the movie without it), and it defeats the entire point of having a POV film by having the characters film themselves from cool angles with the aid of telekinesis, and the fact that the editing makes no damn sense at all (why is there so much footage from so many cameras, and why is it edited in such a fashion?)

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[deleted]

[deleted]

You're not alone on this; I saw it for the first time last night and I felt dumber for watching this. There goes 90 minutes of my life I'll never get back.

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It's just a movie but i was very entertained by it and enjoyed it a lot. I'm sure it's not to everyones taste as all films have their critics. I'm not particularly keen on any of the new Batman films but that's just me.

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Yes, I'm mentally challenged for liking a movie, that makes PERFECT sense! Yes it was a masterpiece, you yourself said you liked, yet you say that it wasn't a masterpiece, that makes no sense! I was never part of the film crew, I'm a guy who just likes entertainment. I'll say this one more time time, this film scored a 85% on rotten tomatoes and a 7.1 on imdb. So who's mentally challenged here?

-Show me the money! 

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[deleted]

It sucked. I rated it 1/10.

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