 Before legendary director Josh Trank gifted the world with Phantfor Stik, he started out with a little indie project called Chronicle. Remember that? I do. Let's talk about it. Every week on this channel, I've been randomly reviewing old movies. This isn't old, it's from 2012. But still, old enough to go back and get a little nostalgia from and share it with you guys, because I want to have positive reviews mixed in with whatever comes out in theaters that disappoints me these days. So the film I watched with my family this week was Chronicle. Chronicle is one of those found footage films like Cloverfield or Blair Witch Project, where everything's filmed from the vantage point of a person holding a camera, a smartphone, you name it, a TV, I mean, whatever. And unlike those other movies I just mentioned, Josh Trank doesn't limit it to just one person's viewpoint. He takes camera shots from all over the place. It's very creative, but it's also a little unnecessary. I found myself wondering why we had to keep doing this. And not only that, but there's multiple moments in this film where people keep pointing out the fact that they're being filmed or they have to go out of their way to show how this shot is being grabbed. I don't care, Josh. You didn't need to do this. You could have just done a little bit of shaky cam without the whole found footage style, because it doesn't really amount to anything when all is said and done. That's the biggest gripe I have with the movie, but if you set that aside, there's a lot that works well in this. Andrew's the main focus of the movie. He's played by Dane Dihon. If I said that right, if I didn't, well, I never say things right, so we'll just keep going. This is a great character with an interesting story arc. He starts out very frail, very secluded. He doesn't want to let people in. He doesn't have many friends. His dad's a piece of shit who drinks a lot and beats him. His mom is dying. They're poor. Bottom line, Andrew's been dealt a shithand. But that all changes when he and a couple of classmates settle upon a mysterious object buried under the ground. It's alien in nature. It's throbbing, pulsating. No, it's not a giant penis. It's some sort of a crystallized experiment or something. We get very little to go on, but we do know this. When they make contact with this thing, all bets are off, and they start to develop supernatural powers, abilities that you could only find on TikTok now. There are a lot of great moments in this movie that did remind me of that app. Where a dude might be punching through a wall or fighting himself or falling endlessly down. They use filters and other creative techniques to make this happen, and they are impressive. But Josh Trank was doing it first, in a chronicle. As these guys develop their abilities, we see them take flight. They're throwing baseballs at each other. They're dodging planes. They're getting hit by lightning. That was an unfortunate, that was an unfortunate moment in the film. My favorite moment is when Andrew attends the high school talent contest, and he picks up cards in reverse. He's going across a tightrope, and then he starts doing flips on it. It's really cool. The audience is loving it, and they're thinking to themselves, how is he doing it? This is cool magic. No, Bish. It's superpowers. As the movie unfolds, the character focus starts to shift from Andrew to his best friend Matt. It's a pretty clever concept by Max Landis and Josh Trank because what's happening is, as Andrew starts to unspool, as he starts to become, I guess, evil and upset, we have to go to Matt to become the new protagonist because now we got Andrew as the antagonist. He's going to start messing shit up. So we need someone to latch onto, someone to root for in this scenario. Unfortunately, Andrew is more interesting in this movie than Matt is, who's more of just a goody two-shoe, kind of by the numbers guy, who is kind of going after this girl that he likes, trying to act all cool. And that love story really goes nowhere. They could have cut out, you know, 10 minutes and you wouldn't have missed anything. What I really like about the story is these characters do have dimension. Mainly the main ones, like Andrew and his dad, who's abusive, but also he was laid off from work. He feels useless. His wife is dying and he can't do anything because he can't afford the meds to keep her going. Michael Kelly does a great job here and I like that he even has a little tiny bit of redemption later. It's not even redemption. It's more just sympathy. You have towards him like, okay, I get it. He's handling this entirely wrong, but I get why he's doing things the way he is. I can see his pain. I feel like this is the first time I saw Michael B. Jordan in a film. I might be wrong. He's probably been another stuff prior that I have seen, but Steve is a fantastic character. He's the most likable kid at school, but he's willing to hang out with Andrew and Matt because they have this connection now. They're in sync with each other, like a boy band. Outside of the storyline, though, it really is those effect-driven moments, those TikTok-esque sequences that don't last very long, but our character is doing something pretty awesome. And because of how it's shot and because of the effects at play, it looks really stunning, especially when Andrew throws a car off the side of a cliff and into the water. Trank uses practical effects when he can, and that's what makes it stand out so much more. And when he can't, there's definitely some age being shown. The baseball they use, for instance, looks pretty CG now. It looks a little silly. And the final shot in the movie is just terrible. Matt goes up into the mountains. He's clearly in front of a green screen. It just looks miserable. I don't know why. Like, they couldn't fly the kid out to some mountains for a day shoot. I mean, I don't know. I don't know the logistics of it. They probably didn't have much of a budget on this thing at all. For a movie that's trying to showcase how realistic it is with the shaky cam and the practical effects, green screening the actor in the final shot just looked bad. It felt like something that was shot last second to change an ending. I don't know any of this speculation on my part. So that's chronicle. Overall, I really dig this movie still. It's shown a little bit of age, but it's so different than everything else out there, and that's why I really like it. The effects are cool. The action's solid. The way the movie really builds up to that final confrontation is very well done. Yeah, overall, I highly recommend watching it. If nothing more than to just say, yeah, I've seen chronicle. I like some of the stuff they did here. This is kind of ahead of the time. Hey, it was enough to impress the suits up top who then gave Josh Trank that cushy-fan-forestick job that was absolutely butchered by everyone involved. And for those saying, release the Trank cut, I can't imagine it's gonna be much better. Anyway, let me know in the comments below what you think of chronicle if you've seen it or if you haven't, but plan on watching now. Cool. Like the video if you had a good time. Subscribe if you haven't. I post content here every single week, movie-related, sometimes TV-show-related. I'm just here to dance for your enjoyment. And if you want to see me dance, also make sure to hit that notification bell so they show up right in your feed. And hopefully I'll see you next time. Sheila, can you bring up some of the related videos? Oh, you're still here. Since I still have you, maybe think about joining me on Patreon at Patreon.com slash Adam Does Movies. 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