I would have liked to have been psychic as a teenager. There’s something reassuring about knowing that, in one of those scalding adolescent moments, you can make somebody’s kidneys explode with a thought. Secretly being psychic, or a superhero, or a wizard, or possibly a martial artist, would be fantastic in that awkward period when you’re hoping to become an alpha male, but seem to be able to do little but grow slowly hairier.
On second thought, it is probably just as well teenage boys are not psychic. Take, for example, Chronicle, where three high-school kids find a crystal thing down a hole near a warehouse rave (‘What did Jung say about glowsticks?’) and develop the power to move objects around slightly unconvincingly with their minds. Naturally it all goes fatally wrong before 83 minutes are up.
Chronicle’s gag is that, like Cloverfield or The Blair Witch Project or all those other movies, it has been filmed by the characters themselves. So in dull moments you can play a game of ‘What exactly are the chances that someone happened to be filming this dramatically significant moment?’ It is partly explained by the fact that one character is a misfit with a thing for filming his life. ‘You don’t think it’s weird? Like it puts a barrier between you and everything else?’ ‘Maybe I want a barrier.’ Or maybe he just has his eye on the film rights.
With its shaky handheld camera, Chronicle keeps its superkids in a real-ish world of high-school angst. (Although each looks roughly twenty-five.) There is less battling the forces of evil than doing magic tricks to impress girls and then sulking. Angst-bitten teen superheroes may not be head-explodingly new. But in Chronicle the multicoloured lycra and the supervillain never actually turn up. The boys are too busy devastating the Pacific Northwest themselves.
Chronicle is a surprisingly good debut film. But it shows its immaturity a little. The boys’ CGI psychic powers look a bit wobbly. Floating objects tend not to move at quite the same rate as the purposeful limbs or clenched temples thrust towards them. And the characters I could swear I have seen before in my pyjamas in some More4 teen drama or other.
But overall, rather like finding a big psychic crystal down a hole near a warehouse rave, Chronicle is an unexpected treat. It just may not quite blow your mind.
FOUR STARS
