I didn't have any real interest in this movie. I am burnt out on "Found Footage" movies, and if we never get any more, it will be too soon.
It's not like other "found footage" movies (at least, I gather it isn't; it's the first one of that genre I've ever actually seen, as far as I can recall). For one thing, the director had the sense to recognize that people who are into working with cameras would actually
know how to use them and would thus be able to point them steadily at things rather than shaking them around like they were going through the DTs in the middle of an earthquake. So it doesn't have the same kind of self-conscious ineptness as the camera work in a lot of other "found footage" films. More importantly, Andrew's obsession with recording everything in his life actually serves a key purpose in exploring his psychology, the way this abused and lonely child uses cameras as a barrier from the world and comes to think of them as his only true friends, becoming increasingly cut off from humanity. So it's not just a stylistic gimmick but a meaningful mechanism for character exploration. (Although, granted, there are a couple of key scenes toward the end where it's implausible that there would actually be a working camera in position to document a certain image, and a lot of the early footage is from a camera that apparently ended up destroyed so it's unlikely anyone could've recovered its footage.) And perhaps it's something of a commentary on the YouTube generation, on young people who get caught up in documenting everything even at the cost of things like privacy and intimacy, and on the way we've become so used to having cameras everywhere that their presence no longer inhibits us from misbehaving.
I mean, seriously, if Peter Parker were a teen in today's world when he got bitten by a radioactive spider, he probably
would record all his superpowered feats on video much like this. The Spidey of the '60s became famous appearing in wrestling matches and TV variety shows, but today he'd probably become famous through viral videos instead. I'd kind of like to see the upcoming
Amazing Spider-Man movie go that route, except that it would be criticized as a copy of this movie if it did.
