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seriousficThe Green Lantern movie had a lot of problems. I mean, a lot. But probably the most damning one was the characters. Aside from the nothing love interest and the more-nothing supporting cast, our hero was an arrogant, cowardly, entitled prig, while our villain was a sensitive, persecuted, compassionate nerd. Screenwriting 101 would dictate that we be rooting for the screwed-over dork to get the girl while the asshole jock was left eating sand. Even the 80s got that. And yet, GL ended with Ryan Reynolds and his CGI abs smugly telling the by-then horribly mutated Peter Sarsgaard that "You have to be chosen" to be a hero, kiss Blake Lively, and not die horribly. Just the thing an audience of superhero fans would want to hear.
Chronicle's genius isn't so much depicting superhumans screwing around before becoming heroes and villains—that was the premise of Spider-Man, way back in the swinging sixties—but in taking advantage of the paradox Green Lantern was blind to. It's told from the perspective of someone who would be the villain in any other superhero movie—Andrew, a teenager who in a breathless opening sequence goes through an ordinary day. Yelled at and beaten by his father, tormented at school, ignored by girls, and even hounded by some neighborhood thugs. After all that, it's a wonder that he doesn't go psycho the moment he gets powers—and a credit to the film that he doesn't, as the continuing struggle between Andrew's newfound friendships and his victimized darkness makes for one of the most engaging stories to come out of the superhero movie boom.
See, Andrew's one friend is Matt, his square-jawed but bland cousin, who'd be the hero of the comic book of this movie. Matt drags Andrew along to a rave, where surprisingly-good-natured jock Steve notices Matt's camera and drafts him into documenting a mysterious crater. Being teenagers, they go inside. One matching set of nosebleeds later, Andrew has a new camera and is documenting the trio testing out their new powers—starting with them beaning each other baseballs at each other. Andrew cracks his first smile of the movie, maybe of his year, when he's the first to 'catch' the ball telekinetically, inches from his face.
From there, events go on in a predictable, yet still horrifying matter. Andrew takes desperate steps to deal with the shit in his life. His friends try to step up.
Now, there have been a number of 'real world superhero' movies that try (and mainly fail) to deconstruct the genre, usually by depicting the would-be heroes as pathetic or insane. The problem there being that it's hard to root for people who are pathetic or insane, especially when the movie is interested in pointing and laughing at them instead of sympathizing. But despite all the hype of Chronicle being a retort to the average superhero movie, it's more in line of a reconstruction. In the end, a newfound hero is swearing to use his powers for good; nothing cynical there. And one of the oddly triumphant moments is when the crew uses their powers to put on a magic show to get Andrew laid. It's a moment right out of a Silver Age comic, the kind of thing you'd see on the Superdickery website. As pandering as a 'found-footage superhero movie' could be (doesn't that just sound cobbled together out of marketing buzzwords for a cheap January release?), all the way through Chronicle has the fingerprints of people who love the superhero genre, are aware of its tropes, and know how to work within the genre to tell their own awesome story.
It's a cliché to say the villain is always more interesting than the hero, but it does happen. If this story were about Matt worrying about his friend and stopping muggings, I have a feeling it would've bombed hard. By focusing on Andrew (who from a character standpoint has much more reason to tote a camera everywhere he goes), the movie inverts the story arc we're used to. The Andrews of the superhero genre are usually relegated to a subplot where they discover their powers with growing malevolence. Ten minutes in they're hearing voices, fifteen minutes in they're taking out that one guy they can't stand, twenty minutes in they're dropkicking babies, and from then on it's them and the hero trading punches for the rest of the movie. By reversing that, Chronicle lets us see the highs of Andrew's life instead of just the low. It gives you the real hope that someone will be able to get through to him before it's too late.
It's hard to overstate just how important that hope is to the film. Just seeing Andrew turn evil would be a depressing slog through greater and greater atrocities. That might be interesting to a slasher fan, but there wouldn't be any tension except our want to see him taken down. By making Andrew a good person who gets dealt a shitty hand, we still want to him stopped when he goes mad with power, but both to stop him from hurting people and because we don't want him to get hurt himself. It worked with the embattled Loki in Thor and it works here.
What also works is that the story doesn't take its structure from any superhero movie you've ever seen, but from wish-fulfillment comedies. The hero is down in the dumps. Suddenly, he gets a boon which seems to solve all his problems! He enjoys his newfound power. Then everything goes to shit and he has to prove his own worth to win the day. What Chronicle does is apply this tried-and-true structure to an abused teenager (giving it higher stakes than the slacker twenty-something with a crappy love life you'd see in most comedies) and carry its tragic consequences through to the end.
I did have some issues. The movie chiefly uses Matt to resolve Andrew's story, but it isn't quite able to stick the landing in transferring the protagonist role from Andrew to him. Part of it is that Matt has so little to offer from a dramatic standpoint as compared to Andrew, and the movie spends so little time on him. I'm sure the filmmakers made the right choice in sacrificing Matt's story on the altar of Andrew's, but I'm also sure there must've been a way to make Matt more compelling even with such a limited role. As it is, the film stops dead when it cuts away from Andrew to show Matt chatting up a random (and convenient!) vlogger.
Also, superhero comics take a lot of flak for how they depict women and minorities, and Chronicle isn't much better. The black guy dies first, and for the female characters, we have a girlfriend who exists solely to be put in danger at the climax and a vixen who solidifies Andrew's turn to the Dark Side by telling the entire school about their abortive sexual encounter. Now, does that really sound like any teenage girl you know? "I was totally going to spread for this guy, but then he vomited on me! Doesn't this story totally reflect well on me? Not one person would call me a slut for totally gossiping about this!" Please. It's a little bit the equivalent of how in Romeo & Juliet (wait, let me finish) the tragic ending comes about because a convenient plague delays a crucial message that could've cleared up the fatal misunderstanding. Andrew has plenty of momentum on his heel turn; there's no need for God to personally give him a shove.
Chronicle's genius isn't so much depicting superhumans screwing around before becoming heroes and villains—that was the premise of Spider-Man, way back in the swinging sixties—but in taking advantage of the paradox Green Lantern was blind to. It's told from the perspective of someone who would be the villain in any other superhero movie—Andrew, a teenager who in a breathless opening sequence goes through an ordinary day. Yelled at and beaten by his father, tormented at school, ignored by girls, and even hounded by some neighborhood thugs. After all that, it's a wonder that he doesn't go psycho the moment he gets powers—and a credit to the film that he doesn't, as the continuing struggle between Andrew's newfound friendships and his victimized darkness makes for one of the most engaging stories to come out of the superhero movie boom.
See, Andrew's one friend is Matt, his square-jawed but bland cousin, who'd be the hero of the comic book of this movie. Matt drags Andrew along to a rave, where surprisingly-good-natured jock Steve notices Matt's camera and drafts him into documenting a mysterious crater. Being teenagers, they go inside. One matching set of nosebleeds later, Andrew has a new camera and is documenting the trio testing out their new powers—starting with them beaning each other baseballs at each other. Andrew cracks his first smile of the movie, maybe of his year, when he's the first to 'catch' the ball telekinetically, inches from his face.
From there, events go on in a predictable, yet still horrifying matter. Andrew takes desperate steps to deal with the shit in his life. His friends try to step up.
Now, there have been a number of 'real world superhero' movies that try (and mainly fail) to deconstruct the genre, usually by depicting the would-be heroes as pathetic or insane. The problem there being that it's hard to root for people who are pathetic or insane, especially when the movie is interested in pointing and laughing at them instead of sympathizing. But despite all the hype of Chronicle being a retort to the average superhero movie, it's more in line of a reconstruction. In the end, a newfound hero is swearing to use his powers for good; nothing cynical there. And one of the oddly triumphant moments is when the crew uses their powers to put on a magic show to get Andrew laid. It's a moment right out of a Silver Age comic, the kind of thing you'd see on the Superdickery website. As pandering as a 'found-footage superhero movie' could be (doesn't that just sound cobbled together out of marketing buzzwords for a cheap January release?), all the way through Chronicle has the fingerprints of people who love the superhero genre, are aware of its tropes, and know how to work within the genre to tell their own awesome story.
It's a cliché to say the villain is always more interesting than the hero, but it does happen. If this story were about Matt worrying about his friend and stopping muggings, I have a feeling it would've bombed hard. By focusing on Andrew (who from a character standpoint has much more reason to tote a camera everywhere he goes), the movie inverts the story arc we're used to. The Andrews of the superhero genre are usually relegated to a subplot where they discover their powers with growing malevolence. Ten minutes in they're hearing voices, fifteen minutes in they're taking out that one guy they can't stand, twenty minutes in they're dropkicking babies, and from then on it's them and the hero trading punches for the rest of the movie. By reversing that, Chronicle lets us see the highs of Andrew's life instead of just the low. It gives you the real hope that someone will be able to get through to him before it's too late.
It's hard to overstate just how important that hope is to the film. Just seeing Andrew turn evil would be a depressing slog through greater and greater atrocities. That might be interesting to a slasher fan, but there wouldn't be any tension except our want to see him taken down. By making Andrew a good person who gets dealt a shitty hand, we still want to him stopped when he goes mad with power, but both to stop him from hurting people and because we don't want him to get hurt himself. It worked with the embattled Loki in Thor and it works here.
What also works is that the story doesn't take its structure from any superhero movie you've ever seen, but from wish-fulfillment comedies. The hero is down in the dumps. Suddenly, he gets a boon which seems to solve all his problems! He enjoys his newfound power. Then everything goes to shit and he has to prove his own worth to win the day. What Chronicle does is apply this tried-and-true structure to an abused teenager (giving it higher stakes than the slacker twenty-something with a crappy love life you'd see in most comedies) and carry its tragic consequences through to the end.
I did have some issues. The movie chiefly uses Matt to resolve Andrew's story, but it isn't quite able to stick the landing in transferring the protagonist role from Andrew to him. Part of it is that Matt has so little to offer from a dramatic standpoint as compared to Andrew, and the movie spends so little time on him. I'm sure the filmmakers made the right choice in sacrificing Matt's story on the altar of Andrew's, but I'm also sure there must've been a way to make Matt more compelling even with such a limited role. As it is, the film stops dead when it cuts away from Andrew to show Matt chatting up a random (and convenient!) vlogger.
Also, superhero comics take a lot of flak for how they depict women and minorities, and Chronicle isn't much better. The black guy dies first, and for the female characters, we have a girlfriend who exists solely to be put in danger at the climax and a vixen who solidifies Andrew's turn to the Dark Side by telling the entire school about their abortive sexual encounter. Now, does that really sound like any teenage girl you know? "I was totally going to spread for this guy, but then he vomited on me! Doesn't this story totally reflect well on me? Not one person would call me a slut for totally gossiping about this!" Please. It's a little bit the equivalent of how in Romeo & Juliet (wait, let me finish) the tragic ending comes about because a convenient plague delays a crucial message that could've cleared up the fatal misunderstanding. Andrew has plenty of momentum on his heel turn; there's no need for God to personally give him a shove.
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no subject
Date: 2012-02-25 03:05 am (UTC)I will say that I was pleased that none of the trailers and none of the reviews spoiled me on Steve's death, so it was a genuine surprise...mostly. Given the setting, and the way the story was going, and the fact that Steve was black, I suddenly knew there was going to be a bad outcome.
And you're right that a big part of the story's appeal is the hope that Andrew might get talked down off the ledge. You're pretty sure not, but...maybe. Also the wish fulfillment aspect. What would you do, what would almost anyone do (especially) as a teenager with the sudden acquisition of phenomenal cosmic power? Play stupid pranks and snigger, of course. And revel in the things your power lets you do (like play football in the clouds). And the characters do all that.
I enjoyed this movie a great deal. Enough so that I will probably go see it again.