Chronicle

I assume for many people the found footage genre began in 1999 with the release of the Blair Witch Project. For weeks all anyone wanted to talk about was "do you think it's real?" "I wonder if they really died?" "holy crap it looks so real" "it was so real it scared me to death!" The hype, style, and the fact that the camera existed within the narrative made it harder to maintain a barrier between yourself and what you were seeing, ultimately people we're able to suspend their disbelief a little further and easier than they had been in Hollywood as of late. Of course it was fake, you paid 8 dollars to see it at your local mall, everyone knew the police were never going to let real footage like that filter out and while it looked rushed and amateur there were things about it that just felt to prepared and practiced and developed, there were points at which you were like "if these people are real they have the worst case of the Hollywood horroretards I've ever seen." But it worked and found footage films pretty much exploded onto the scene.

Interestingly enough for me the terror and awesomeness of found footage started in 1986 with Aliens. The marines we're each equipped with their own camera and vial information screen that the lieutenant could follow back in the too awesome for words armored car. There are scenes when the marines first engage the aliens, when they take you away from the action that's happening and put you in the armored car to watch Riply, Burke, and Goreman react to the fact that the marines are being blended like a banana cherry smoothie. This was awesome, you could see what was happening on the screens, knew that these people were terrified because they were getting a front row premier of what was most likely gonna happen to them and they kept you focused on the action cause the marines cameras had audio too. So you didn't need to be right there cause you were listening to them scream and die and yell at each other and fire weapons you saw how horrible this was on the faces of the people in the car. Ultimately I think this is why found footage can really work as a fictional genre it takes at least some of the barrier between the audience and the subject matter and shreds it completely, and when it really works it takes more of that barrier than you're generally comfortable with away.

Interestingly enough I went to Wikipedia (don't wiki kids it's a gateway information source) and looked up found footage and the genre has a longer history than I was aware of. Guess I'll be doing some more research :)

Stating up front that I liked Chronicle. I think it would have been better to be a full on fiction piece without the format of found footage because while the story is interesting I was left with far too many questions about the non super power elements of the story. Your story has to be MORE interesting than the questions: "Who put this documentary together, How did it get out? What were the effects of these events on the innocent bystanders and other civilians?" Blair Witch was simple "They took the tapes and played them in the theaters" and from the looks of it that's the out that most of these movies use. "Here watch these totally not fake or directed tapes we "found" Chronicle doesn't have that luxury. In the fictional universe of Chronicle someone went through hundreds of hours of footage from security camera's, the boys tapes, girl's blog footage, the traffic camera's, the cell phones and cameras of the people on the space needle, this footage was dispersed all over the city and understanding that the ultimate assembly of the narrative is part of the narrative itself we begin to wonder who put this thing together for us to see. Now normally this is just a minor question but when the boys go back to the sink hole there are park rangers there block things off and the seed that something larger is going on here is planted and instantly your questions about the origin of the assembled film becomes more interesting than the story your watching.

Add the above to the problem every found footage film faces at some point: It requires a little more suspension of disbelief than other presentation formats. You have to accept the fact that they "establish the camera" within the universe of the characters and that everyone will only flip out about the constant filming for a very minor, even trivial amount of time because if the filming character relents and stops filming then BAM! movie over, which is bad. So you have to find a way to make your characters not care about being filmed within their own reality and that's hard, because we in real life don't like being filmed 24/7 and we wouldn't stop hounding people to turn the damn camera off. So there's a disconnect there that makes your brain unable to accept the "reality" of the footage almost from the get go once the characters just decide to go on and accept being constantly filmed in really extraordinary circumstances.
Found Footage can be an awesome presentation tool, but if your story goes like this:

CHARACTER: "I'ma start filming 24/7 for no good god damned reason"

And the next thing you know the craziest shit humanly possible goes down for questionable at best reasons? YOU HAVE A NARRATIVE STRUCTURE PROBLEM. Yes it's a bummer but you can fix it with just a little creativity.

Chronicle has this problem. And their attempt at making it seem normal is to follow our camera wielding character around his normal everyday depressingly less than average world. And when the movie begins to get crazy or in ANY WAY interesting it's because two other characters find a fucking plot hole. It's a hole in the ground and it moves the plot along. I am not making this shit up. This is also where you begin to wonder who assembled all this found footage because the kids lost their first camera in the crater that Kal-El's baby carriage was in. And sense we're seeing it assembled that means someone went in and at the very least got the camera, and I'm assuming retrieved Superman's spaceship and took it to Area 51. Am I supposed to be asking these questions? Considering the movie not only doesn't address them at all, but pretty much chooses to ignore the plot hole once things go wakadoodle I am assuming they were hoping against hope that we would just go "crazy living tentacle covered space diamond that turns out to be a brain warping vending machine? Nah I don't want to know more about that, 30 minutes of practical jokes and telekinetic pranks AWAY!"

The interesting thing is that the camaraderie works for me. I like the trio as they develop and it's genuinely disappointing to see the downfall of everything. But I cannot help but admit that every time I expected the movie to finally deal with the fact that these kids we're about as secretive and subtle as a jack hammer and yet received no calls from any shadowy government or black suited agency type really confused me. Again taking me away from the strengths of found footage and pushing me squarely into "Damn I wish this was just a 'Normal' movie" territory. Hell even a conversation that looked like this:

"Why don't you think the men in black have knocked on our door yet?"

"Are you stupid? That Will Smith crap doesn't exist in the really real world."

would have at least addressed the very real feeling that there is a whole half of this narrative that we're missing because they couldn't figure out how to wedge it into the found footage format. Again creativity here is not a sin. About the furthest into really left brain creativity they get is the scene at the top of the space needle with the bystanders phones and the girlfriend filming for her blog, because well they needed an excuse for her to be filming her half of EVERYTHING.

Ultimately I left the theater with more questions than I wanted to have, but found myself genuinely enjoying what I had seen. there were some interesting attempts to craft solutions to the technical problems prevalent in "found footage" genre films but ultimately I think that they paid far to much attention to the camera as an object in the environment, I do look forward to seeing a "found footage" film that finds a way to seamlessly insert the camera into the narrative with out making it a burden or an often unnecessary catalyst/ topic of conversation.