I guess if people expected it to be like Pitch Black they were disappointed. I didn’t see Pitch Black until later (and didn’t find it very memorable), but they are very different movies.
I think the thing I like so much about Chronicles is that it’s unabashedly fantastical and epic. It reminds me of Warhammer 40k and Conan the Barbarian, really fine cheese.
It’s essentially just a bunch of pre-made css classes that do a specific thing that you mix and match from.
AFAIK the programmatic part is so your served CSS file will only include the classes you actually use, rather than all available ones. You could always just not do that.
It always seemed to me like one of the least overengineered front end tools.