ANALYSIS:

CHRONICLE looks better from the trailer.  What you end up with is a found footage version of UNBREAKABLE.  It revolves around three high school boys (Andrew, Matt, and Steve) who find a hole and touch some glowing crystals.  These crystals give them the increasing ability to move objects with their mind and to fly.   One of these three teenagers, Andrew is chronicling the events with a video camera.   He even learns to move the camera around in the air as his power grows and his emotional problems increase.   

CHRONICLE tries to be a found footage movie, a drama about a teenage with issues, and a superhero drama.   I wish the movie had a real bad guy instead of the teenagers turning into enemies of each other.  Andrew is painted as an outsider where he has an abusive drunk father and a sick mother plus hardly any friends except the cousin he barely hangs with.  He doesn't get with the girls and his attempts at getting some ends in disappointment and ridicule.   He starts to spiral more out of control since he gained these new abilities.   The movie eventually comes to a big battle climax where more video cameras start to capture the action.  In the end, CHRONICLE showed promise and ended up as a tired clichéd failure.

SPECIAL FEATURES:

The deleted scene (Matt and Casey in the kitchen) was thankfully cut for time and it was covered in almost the same way in another scene in the final film.   Also on the disc are pre-viz footage for a couple of the major sequences in the film while the Camera Test footage lasts four minutes and it is tests for the scene in the diner and the car moving scene with at least two different actors, and the theatrical trailer in addition to previews for PROMETHEUS, BAD ASS, ACT OF VALOR, GET THE GRINGO, AMERICAN HORROR STORY season 1, and MARTHA MARCY MAY MARLENE.

FINAL ANALYSIS:   The Director’s Cut adds five minutes back into the movie- I couldn’t tell much of a difference.   The Blu-ray does include the ability to view either version.   The Blu-ray has a slight amount of extras and yet they do prove to be worthwhile extras, but I wish they had an audio commentary or some behind-the-scenes featurettes included.

This review is (c)5-18-2012 David Blackwell and cannot be reprinted without permission.  Send all comments to feedback@enterline-media.com