Take Cloverfield for example, which
is a film I do love but suffers from these problems immensely. There's a scene
in that movie in which they are running through a subway whilst being chased by
some little monsters that have fallen off a bigger beastie's underside and even
then the camera continues to film.
I'm sorry, but if I was in a small corridor being chased by Godzilla's angry
pubic-lice, I'd be ripping off my own fucking arms just so that I could lose a
little weight and run a tiny bit faster. As for the second problem, well... by
the end of the film all of the main characters are- spoiler alert- dead. This
is the same for so many films in the genre from The Blair Witch Project to
Paranormal Activity. With this in mind, I always wonder which sick
turd-monger found an extended snuff film and decided to edit a fucking
narrative out of it? I mean, it really bothers me. Take the footage of Gaddafi
being killed for example which is five minutes long and features nothing but
his execution. Now imagine if he'd recorded a video diary whilst on the run
which was found, edited into a film and released in cinemas! Not only would you
have to question the sanity of whoever thought that would be a good idea but
you'd also probably be left with the most morally reprehensible and cynical
film since 2003's Love Actually.
Another movie that has recently fallen into
this genre is 2012's Chronicle which right from the start managed to do
something a little different. Most releases that claim to feature homemade
footage tend to either be horror films or stolen porn, however this rather
differently opted to be about superheroes instead. Actually, to give the film
credit, it's not even about superheroes really, with it spending more time
investigating what normal high schoolers would do if given amazing super-human
gifts. Personally, I think if any of us developed powers then it wouldn't take
long for us to use them for either thieving or perving. However, although Chronicle
doesn't quite go down this route, it does spend a good while showing the
main characters enjoying a fair bit of mischief before things go wrong and the
shit hits the fan.
 |
| "Who's got a touch of the mad-cunt about them?" |
Just to quickly summarise the set-up for
anybody who’s not yet seen it, there are three friends who get blasted by
radiation from some big blue rock thing that they find underground. From then
on they become telekinetic, meaning that they can move inanimate objects using
just their mind. One of the lads however is suffering a slightly turbulent home
life with his father being an abusive alcoholic and his mother dying from a
disease that leaves her bed ridden and mumbling. Not to ruin what happens but
this guy also has a touch of the mad-cunt about him and so probably isn't the
best creepy critter to be given magical abilities that allow him to kill. It's
also this slightly odd chap who has decided to film every single thing that he
does and so by default I guess is the main character. I suppose this movie is a
bit like Carrie but for the YouTube generation in which any old twat
with a pulse feels the urge to dramatise their own life and share it with the
world for likes and hits. If Kick-Ass is a film about heroes without
powers then on the flipside, Chronicle is a film about powers without
heroes.
So I guess at first we should discuss the
films good points of which there are more than plenty. The acting for a start
is really very good with each actor managing to convey the various complexities
required of them in a completely naturalistic way. As mentioned at the start,
the handheld style is often used to make up for a shitty budget and so in past
films there's also been a slightly shitty cast to go with it. That's not the
case here though, with lead actor Dane Dehaan managing to retain the audiences
sympathy (or at least our understanding) even when he starts to slip into the
unhinged land of the psychotic vengeful prick. According to the ever reliable IMDb,
Chronicle's budget was allegedly around $12,000,000 which is next to
nothing in terms of funding a film of this scale. Obviously the average human
could lead a happy life of cocaine and whores with that amount of cash but for
a superhero film it does seem fairly ambitious. Although some of the flying
scenes in the film kind of look a little green-screened, it's not really that
obvious and so the film should be proud that it accomplished something of such
scale with so little resources. To put things in perspective, you could fund
around sixteen films at this cost for the same budget as the diabolically
fuck-awful Transformers 3: Dark of the Moon. On top of that there'd
probably still be enough change left over to have that life of drug filled
orgies as well.
As with every found-footage film though, Chronicle
once again falls victim to those two issues of ‘why film It?’ And, ‘who
edited it?’ In regards to the first point, I can understand why you might want
to film yourself if you've just learnt how to fly. There's millions of people
uploading footage of themselves shaking their fat arses to music online right
now and so I have no issue with some gifted fucker wanting evidence of his
ability to defy gravity. However there's a female character walking about
without any powers and she never puts her bloody camera down. There's one scene
at a rave in fact where she's filming one of the main characters whilst he
films her and they have a conversation with each other. In terms of character
development, the conversation is completely relevant but in terms of reality,
it's just kind of boring. I guess within the context of the story, this chat is
important but the characters can't see the bigger picture and so as a small
conversation, you'd turn the fucking camera off and save its battery. Also, as
somebody who tits about with cameras from time to time I'd really love to know
how they got such clear sound from their conversation amongst all of the much
louder background music. I think that for those school kids to have such a
phenomenal microphone at an affordable price is the moment that this film
really makes its roots in sci-fi particularly obvious. Oh and yes I can hear
the 'Pedantic Arsehole Alarm', going off here too...
 |
| "So who do you think will be fucked to edit our film?" |
As for the second question of who edited
the footage- well, in this case I really haven't got a fucking clue. Near the
end of the film there is a huge fight across the city which, although visually
brilliant, in reality would be a massive bitch of a sequence to put together.
This is a task made harder by the fact that at this point the main characters
camera has buggered off and so all the footage we see is seamlessly pieced
together from images captured on CCTV, news reports and the public’s various
mobile phones. So if we're to watch this film under the belief that it is found
footage then we're also to believe that some randomer did a region wide
collection of video material. In fact there's a shot at the very end in a
random place, in a random country that proves that their collection was not
only very thorough but that their obsession and interest was probably kind of
unhealthy. The kind of person with the patience to collect all that footage
would probably also be the kind to have newspaper cuttings of a celebrity on
his damp walls that have their eyes scratched out and are coated in semen.
The thing is though that the film really
doesn't need the found-footage stuff at all. Like I said, in that final battle
the images are coming from so many various cameras that the purpose for it
being handheld becomes seriously unclear. Instead of just being able to
appreciate the nice looking shots, you end up wondering how they got it and
where it was from. Early on too, the film gets around the issue of never having
the cameraman on screen by having the camera follow the main character via his
telekinesis. I mean, don't get me wrong, I can appreciate the inventiveness of
that but it still makes the concept of them filming it themselves seem fairly
redundant. Two films that get around this problem are both District 9 and
Monsters and perhaps Chronicle should have looked to them for inspiration.
District 9 claimed to be found footage until the action started at which
point it just fucked off that idea and filmed everything as normal. Monsters
was a low budget film that had a handheld feel but still managed to look
beautiful and avoided the problems of each shot demanding the scrutiny of its
logistics. Look, I know I'm coming across like a proper nitpicking bastard but
these things bother me. I dunno... maybe I have low-level autism or something.
It's just that for me, the found footage style makes the claim of increasing
the realism that with film you take for granted anyway and in doing so
ironically raises more questions about its believability.
That aside though, I did love the film- a
lot.. not only does it feature interesting characters but it slightly subverts
the superhero genre by having it follow someone who really isn't a hero at all.
The film itself was directed by Josh Trank whose next movie will be the
re-booted Fantastic Four which, based on this, I'm genuinely excited to
see. It's also interesting to note that every director who has made a
successful deconstruction of the superhero genre has gone on to do something
official for Marvel as their very next project. So that's Trank, Matthew
Vaughn, James Gunn and Jeff Wadlow I guess. I have nowhere to go with that
point, it's just something that I'd noticed and I'm at a point where I could do
with any readers letting me know if it is in fact autism or perhaps OCD that
I'm suffering from. Max Landis is also worthy of praise in regards to Chronicle
considering he wrote the script that it's based on. If his surname sounds
familiar then that's because he is the son of legendary film director John
Landis. Hollywood is a hard place to break into and so I can't help but wonder
who young Landis had to suck off to get in…
Anyway so the film is very good- it's just
such a shame that in my humble opinion, the gimmick of found footage is a
fundamentally flawed one. Having said that, Chronicle is a well written,
well directed, well acted mixture of Carrie, Grizzly Man and
Akira. Even if the found-footage thing is a distracting pain in the arse,
you're still left with a pretty good ninety minutes of inventive, cult shit to
enjoy so really, I shouldn't complain.
Follow this blog or I'll fucking cut you.
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