Chronicle

I've been doing a lot of reading, you know? Like, online about, like, just evolution and natural selection and how like there's this thing, right? It's called the apex predator, right? And basically what this is, is the strongest animal in the ecosystem, right? And as human beings, we're considered the apex predator but only because smaller animals can't feed on us because of weapons and stuff, right? A lion does not feel guilty when it kills a gazelle, right? You do not feel guilty when you squash a fly... and I think that means something. I just think that really means something.

   There is a time and a place for found footage films.  That time and place is horror movies, circa 2008.  The Blair Witch Project was groundbreaking.  [REC] perfected it.  Now it's dead, and we don't need anymore of them.  I'll give credit where credit is due: Chronicle was less shaky than the new Superman movie.  Go home, Hollywood, you're drunk.
   Basically, three high school kids find a cave filled with a giant, glowy thing inside.  Of course they touch it, because they're morons.  Next thing we now they're moving cars and flying around.  Steve is the super popular aspiring politician, charming and somehow nice to everyone.  Matt is the philosopher, and a pretentious douche bag.  If you don't think he's a pretentious douche bag, you might be a pretentious douche bag yourself.  Andrew is hostile, the victim of his father's abuse and seems to only care for his dying mother.  He's also the most powerful and dangerous of the three.
   As Matt tries to create rules to control their new-found telekinesis, but Andrew is having none of that.  He shoves a stranger's car off the road into a pond, crushes cars in a junkyard, and eventually he may or may not kill Steve.  I couldn't tell for sure.  With Steve out of the picture, we're left only with Matt, who becomes mildly less annoying through the course of the movie, and Andrew.  By the time Andrew splays a spider and tears it apart with only his mind, you can tell he's really not all there anymore.
   Anyway, unlike other found footage movies, Chronicle actually uses more than one camera.  It cuts to footage from other cameras, camera phones, police video, and surveillance video.  In terms of a fictional movie, that is pretty neat.  Relevant, too.  Everyone is an amateur photographer nowadays, and I have no doubt that if some sixteen-year-old threw a bitch fit and started creating a natural disaster with his mind, bystanders would be more concerned with filming it than running away.
   All in all, Chronicle was okay.  Neither terribly good nor terribly bad.  Forgettable, but enjoyable.  I'll give Chronicle three crushed cars out of five and probably never think about it again.