Chronicle

Well, I suppose the one line description is "Blair Witch Meets X-Men".

There's a angry loner kid in high school, who's a weird outsider, and who has recently decided to carry a film camera everywhere and document his life. This leads to his cousin and his cousin's friend to call on him to come film a weird hole in the ground they discover, which they investigate and find a weird glowing rock that grants them telekinetic powers.

This leads the three of them to bond, as they decide to keep their powers secret as they investigate what they can do with them, which turns out to be increasingly powerful feats of telekinesis, including shielding themselves from harm, and flying. And the question becomes, what are 17 year-olds really going to start doing when they get these powers? Especially if one of them is an angry frustrated loner?

The answer, refreshingly, at no point becomes "fight crime", and so the film that I feel it's eventually thematically closer to is Carrie. Sadly, for a film that's been quite inventive for the first three quarters, the finale feels kind of a let down, as if the ideas ran out before the film did. Even so, that's three-quarters of a film of really neat stuff, and a finale that'd be absolutely fine in a more run of the mill film. I mean, has there *ever* been a superhero movie where the final act hasn't been "everyone beats fuck out of each other until only one side is left standing"?