Arbitrary.
That’s the whole movie, in a nutshell. Just about completely arbitrary.
The effects are okay, and the eye candy (of the feminine variety) is acceptable, but when you kill off every character I have any connection with and make a not-terribly-interesting anti-hero your protagonist, well… I just can’t get worked up about it.
And any movie which wastes the prodigious talents of both Dame Judi Dench and Colm Feore is a movie that can’t be worth anybody’s time.
Writer and director David Twohy has a reputation, to my mind unearned, as a writer of intelligent science fiction movies. I admit that Pitch Black was a decent little thriller, though still arbitrary, but when you look back to The Arrival, which many hold up as his finest achievement in this area, all I see is dreck, a fatuous plot, a perpetually-high Charlie Sheen pretending to be (snort) a scientist, and a pretty good Ron Silver turn as the villain.
But here, in Chronicles, everything is just utterly arbitrary.
Dench plays Aereon, who is an Elemental. And what, pray tell, is an Elemental? A creature that has characteristics of one of the Elements. Why? No clue. How many are there? Only Dench, it seems. How did they come to be? Search me. What is their/her agenda? Far as I can tell, simply to know the information needed to move the plot forward.
The baddies are the Necromongers, who worship death without, you know, going quite so far as suicide. How they got started is a mystery, as is their means of financing their rapacious empire.
In fact, the whole background makes no economic sense at all. What activities generate the wealth necessary for interstellar travel? The only person with an apparent career is a bounty hunter, not exactly a profession that creates wealth.
The planet attacked is New Mecca (or maybe that was one city on the planet, but you won’t get me to watch again to find out), where they are predominantly Muslim, but live in peace and harmony and brother-love with all religions. Except, of course, the Necromongers.
Which, excuse me, is just entirely too PC for my taste. Granting that the vast majority of Muslims today are peaceful, this just smacks of preaching from the Hollywood pulpit. How many movies since 9/11 have shown a Muslim who burns to convert everyone to his belief system or kill them trying? None. How many have made US generals, cops, or businessmen out to be either short-sighted fools or lip-smacking baby-killers? I’m not sure numbers go that high.
Another thing: why do… No. I’ve spent entirely too much time thinking about this movie. Bleh.