Chronicle

Three teenage boys crawl into a hole and encounter some glowing thingamajig. (Who cares what it is? It’s just a plot device, as good as any other hocus-pocus.) When they come out they have picked up telekinetic ability. And here’s where it gets neat. Do they come up with some great plan to use these powers for good, or evil? No, they’re just guys. They pick up rocks with their minds and skip them out over the lake. They play some childish pranks. They try to figure out some way of using this power to get laid. They learn to fly, and almost get themselves killed farting around in the sky. And they soon realize that it’s like a muscle: The more you use it, the stronger it gets. So if you can pick up a pebble, that implies you could pick up a rock, or a car, or a city bus, or a building … One of the boys has been severely bullied, is shy, and has other issues like a dying mother and an abusive father. You just know there will be an explosion sooner or later. So in a way this is like Carrie for dudes.

This is a “found footage” movie, and I think we’re getting too many of them, but the writer and director come up with some ingenious ways to make it work. They even eliminate some of the jerkiness in later scenes (hooray!) because the guy no longer holds the camera, but floats it steadily in the air with his mind. Let’s face it, today’s youth are never without a recording device, so it’s plausible this could have been assembled from multiple sources, including surveillance cameras. (Do kids today still speak of “filming” stuff? I’d have thought “taping” would be better, but maybe not. Modern video cameras don’t use tape, anyway, or even discs.) The special effects here are flawless, and awesome, and meticulously thought out. It all just looks so damn real. It gets big and noisy at the end, but not offensively so. Even that part looks like it was all pulled together from multiple cameras, some of them soundless and black and white. This movie was made for the pittance of $12 million, stars no one you ever heard of, and is ten times better than most of the SF movies I’ve seen lately.