The dopily derivative Earth
to Echo is a plucky kids’ sci-fi adventure that arrives mediated through
layers of visual and cultural clutter. It’s a found footage movie that finds
its 13-year-old characters constantly filming themselves. We get angles from a
camcorder, spy glasses, GoPro, and iPhones while the film juggles images from
webchats, YouTube videos, screenshots, GPS, monitors, Google Maps, and fuzzy
digitized alien POVs. Sometimes it’s supposed to be a video cut together after
the fact by our main characters, but as is usually the case with these kinds of
movies, the visual approach is scattershot. Just once I’d like to see a found
footage movie that’s actually visually incomprehensible without carefully
framed shots that catch the bulk of the information we need in any given scene
while looking like an accident. Given the age of the protagonists here,
cinematographer Maxime Alexandre’s camerawork’s shiny, professional amateurism
is the motion picture equivalent of the backwards “R” in the Toys"R"Us logo.
We get the shorthand, but we also get the idea no kid would make such perfect
errors.
In this particular found footage movie, we follow three
tween boys, a camera-loving average guy (Brian “Astro” Bradley), a shy nerd
(Reese Hartwig), and a moody foster kid (Teo Halm). Best friends, they’re sad
their suburban Nevada neighborhood is set to be demolished to make way for a
new highway. They decide to have one last night of fun before moving separate ways.
It just so happens they’ve been receiving strange map-like signals on their
phones and decide to fake a sleepover – the old
tell-each-parent-they’re-staying-somewhere-else trick – and head out into the
desert to follow the directions. Now, I don’t know about you, but my first
reaction to receiving mysterious, unknowable maps on my phone would not be to
follow them. But I digress.
Having seen dozens of found footage horror movies, the opening scenes evoke some Pavlovian horror
anticipation, but the kids merely discover a bleeping alien robot thing that
looks like a small, twee version of the clockwork owl from Clash of the Titans. It communicates only by beeping, a process
they quickly use to figure out that the little guy needs to find enough spare
parts to cobble together a signal to open his missing spaceship and go home. The
rest of the movie takes place during this one crazy night as the three boys,
plus a token girl (Ella Wahlestedt) they pick up along the way, sneak around
the suburbs on a scavenger hunt for their silent alien buddy. They spend their
time helping him plan his planetary escape while hiding him from creepy
pseudo-governmental forces led by an untrustworthy construction foreman (Jason
Gray-Stanford).
This debut feature for writer Henry Gayden and director Dave
Green plays like an updated, first-person, social media and smart
phone-saturated version of all those 80’s kids’ adventures (like Explorers or Flight of the Navigator) where kids roamed free and got into small,
contained sci-fi adventures. I suppose it’s the answer for anyone who ever
wanted to watch E.T. and Stand by Me at the same time without
having to worry about watching a great movie. But it’s all done so earnestly that it can’t help but be
effective at conveying friendship in the face of very early adolescent
uncertainty. It’s not so much about the alien, which provides a B-movie hook,
but rather in the kids’ bonding.
When the movie casually pokes at the sense of genuine care
and friendship these kids have, it works pretty well. The young performers have
a fun rapport that’s convincing, and shyness around the sudden introduction of
The Girl that feels spot on. She’s quickly made a part of the team, given some
hasty characterization, and barely becomes a source of romantic tension, so at
least there’s that. The four kids seem like real kids, testing the limits of
childhood vocabulary and expression (one kid awkwardly blurts out that he
thinks “mannequins are hot, okay?”) while fumbling with new feelings, trying to
make sense of the encroaching adult world. Older brothers, security guards, bar
patrons, and parents are all the same kind of mystery here. No wonder the
alien’s more understandable to them.
The core relationships aren’t enough to overcome the cheesy
writing and slapdash style. There’s so much schmaltz and shaky-cam placed on
top of it that it’s sometimes hard to care. I certainly couldn’t ever really
get invested in the alien or his plight. His design is generic and his
personality is nonexistent. When we get our big moment of tearful love for the
little guy, I wasn’t feeling it. Since that’s the main thrust of the narrative,
it’s a problem. The sloppy, inconsistent, unpredictable visual style certainly
doesn’t help matters. There are some neat special effects and a small bit of
charm to the premise, but it’s nothing too involving or especially interesting.
Still, it’s sweet and sincere enough, and the leads are likeable enough, that it
wouldn’t surprise me if kids who see it now will grow up with outsized affection
for it all the same.
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