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A lean, inventive superhero-origin story that uses found-footage style to make teenage power fantasy feel immediate, funny, and increasingly tragic. It’s strongest as a character study of alienation and ego, with enough spectacle to satisfy even when some dialogue and effects show their age.
Where to watch: Buy
Wed · 1h 24m
Director: Josh Trank
Starring: Dane DeHaan, Alex Russell, Michael B. Jordan
Three high school students make an incredible discovery, leading to their developing uncanny powers beyond their understanding. As they learn to control their abilities and use them to their advantage, their lives start to spin out of control, and their darker sides begin to take over.
Josh Trank
Dane DeHaan, Alex Russell, Michael B. Jordan
A lean, inventive superhero-origin story that uses found-footage style to make teenage power fantasy feel immediate, funny, and increasingly tragic. It’s strongest as a character study of alienation and ego, with enough spectacle to satisfy even when some dialogue and effects show their age.
Chronicle takes a simple premise—what if three teens got superpowers—and makes it feel uncomfortably plausible. The found-footage approach gives the movie a scrappy energy that works especially well in the early scenes, where curiosity, boredom, and social awkwardness all feel lived-in rather than manufactured. It’s a smart blend of sci-fi, teen drama, and disaster movie instincts.
What gives the film its staying power is the way it treats power as an amplifier of existing damage. The movie is less interested in wish fulfillment than in resentment, loneliness, and the thrill of finally being able to push back. That makes it darker than the average origin story, and also more memorable, even if some of the dialogue is clunky and the ending leans a little too hard into spectacle.
Even with a few rough edges, it remains one of the more distinctive superhero-adjacent films of its era. The performances, especially the central turn, sell the emotional descent, and the movie’s small-scale approach helps the chaos feel personal. It’s a strong pick if you want genre filmmaking with a mean streak and a tragic aftertaste.
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me and the boys in creative mode
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an incel, a philosopher, and a jock walk into a cave...
adambolt (3.5★) · 3662 likes
hey guys welcome to my epic vlog where i fucken murder everyone with my cool powers
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with great power comes great vlogs
Bethany · 1704 likes
i lost my virginity while watching this movie
A classic story of adolescent humiliation turning into catastrophic power, with a similarly tragic sense of escalation.
A landmark of psychic power, youth volatility, and destructive transformation on a massive scale.
Body horror and tragic character collapse make it a strong match for the film’s doomed momentum.
For viewers who respond to the raw immediacy of found-footage storytelling and escalating dread.
Shares the handheld, in-the-middle-of-chaos energy and the sense of ordinary lives colliding with disaster.
A sharp modern genre film about power, fear, and abuse, with a tense, intimate perspective.
Teen ensemble sci-fi with paranoia, social friction, and a fun but uneasy high-school setting.
A more optimistic power-fantasy counterpart that still centers on responsibility and identity.
One of the best superhero films about the burden and cost of power, with strong emotional fallout.
For its mix of teen isolation, eerie atmosphere, and a protagonist drifting toward catastrophe.
Not a genre match, but for viewers interested in the observational, reality-adjacent texture that found-footage can evoke.
A smart companion for the teen alienation and self-absorption side of the story, minus the superpowers.
superpowers, teen alienation, power corruption, male friendship, coming of age, found footage, moral decay, bullying and resentment
superhero origin, found footage, teen drama, psychological descent, dark sci-fi, thriller, coming-of-age, moral corruption, low-budget spectacle, 2010s