Earth To Echo hits theaters nationwide July 2nd from Relativity Media
More slick-packaged target marketing than actual film, I surprisingly still don’t find myself truly disliking Earth To Echo. Mind you, its parallels to better films such as The Goonies and E.T. are legion. And by citing the combination of those two films, it is almost as though you’ve already seen Earth To Echo. Only in the found footage style. Which makes it ever so 2014, but also significantly worse than the films it pays homage to. And then, when you allow yourself to remember Super 8, from only a few years ago, you might remember that even that love letter to Spielberg didn’t wholly succeed, (though I liked it more than most) even with a full bag of gorgeous cinematic trickery at its disposal not limited by a “found footage” framework.
From a business standpoint, Earth To Echo makes all kinds of sense: Make this generation’s E.T. with only a couple million bucks, shuck it to the “YouTube generation”, put feet on desk, count money pouring in. And it will make bank. Regardless of whether Earth To Echo is some kind of breakout monster hit or not, the movie will turn a profit because it almost certainly cost VERY little to produce, and has enough mass appeal, not to mention a cute little CGI alien/robot/thingee, to turn a profit. So good on first time feature director Dave Green and writer Henry Gayden for probably making an excellent pitch and getting a feature made. And good on them for almost making a real film, too.
That sounds pretty mean, but I don’t entirely mean it to. When we’re first introduced to Tuck (Brian “Astro” Bradley, the filmmaker kid), Munch (Reese Hartwig, the kid who is Chunk from The Goonies), and Alex (Teo Halm, the pretty, strong, silent foster kid), there is a lot to like about them. The child actors are serviceable, there are some funny moments between them, their rapport feels genuine, and we are told very early on that they’re all having to move from their neighborhood because a highway is being built through it. (So, again… it is The Goondocks… without even the thinnest of veils). There was enough going on from a character and script standpoint that Earth To Echo actually had me in the first act. The human elements worked their charms on me, and then slowly all the sci-fi and video gamey and market-friendly elements lost me.
Echo himself is more macguffin than character, which is probably the cardinal sin of Earth To Echo. E.T. is fleshed out. He is a character. He matters to us. Echo is designed for maximum cuteness and plot advancement, serving kind of like those fairies in Zelda games that keep your adventure on the right track with little beeps and whistles. If I were between, say, seven years old and twelve years old, I’d want an Echo toy real bad. But then I would grow up and lose interest in Echo because there is nothing timeless or original about him. I would grow up, discover E.T., and then love HIM forever because he’ll always be relevant because he’s so perfectly fleshed out and realized. Echo, instead, just keeps putting new maps onto our characters’ phones so they can bounce from one adventure to the next in their video game quest to… have one awesome final night together as buddies.
And therein lies another another major problem. The goals or stakes of Earth To Echo are pretty low, and our characters’ motivations are hazy. Elliott and his friends had to help E.T. get home. And they had to do it before the government men captured him for experimentation. Bam. Clear objectives and wondrous peril. Echo kind of needs the same thing, but since he only communicates in beeps and sweet iPhone graphics, we really just run after our little crew as they assemble parts for his spaceship. And aside from Echo, all our little dudes want is to have one last awesome night together as friends before they get split up… so you don’t even have the thrill of hope that they can save The Goondocks, er… or whatever their town is called.
Offering little to nothing to adults who will take their kids to this movie, Earth To Echo is a serviceable sci-fi adventure for the seven to twelve year old demographic. And Relativity knows this and have hence crafted exactly that movie that will hit that demographic square in the wallet. Early on I felt the thrill of being a kid again, and got the sense all around me in the kid-filled auditorium I was watching it in that they were feeling that too. But the theater got more and more quiet as the on-rails video game product rolled ahead, with only the cuteness of little Echo to stir my cold adult heart which knows that E.T. exists and is leagues better. You could do a lot worse than Earth To Echo if you have kids in the sweet spot that this movie was made for. They might even love it. But there’s nothing timeless here, nothing that hasn’t been done better before. It just has that 2014 sheen that’ll feel more like rust a few short years from now.
And I’m Out.
