I know how Earth to Echo ended up in my queue. It is a found footage movie and fake documentary, which are some of my favorite genres. Then I saw that it was a family friendly movie with three little boys trying to help a cute alien and considered deleting it from my queue without watching it. I should have trusted my instincts and run the other way because I am too old for this shit. I regretted watching it as soon as I pressed play.
Earth to Echo had a decent cover story to universally get every viewer to empathize. Being separated from your friends during childhood because of moving has affected everyone whether it was you or your friend who had to move. Unfortunately everything afterwards except for one scene near the denouement is so predictable, it is painful.
The movie is only ninety-one minutes long, but it feels longer. I especially despise when films show flashbacks of scenes shown earlier. I was there. Please spare me the montage.
When you watch Earth to Echo, you are signing up to watch children play a high stakes scavenger hunt, which gives them an opportunity to have one last hurrah doing all the things that they never dared to do and hash out any issues that they had with each other. Scavenger hunts can be fun to play, but have you ever watched other people in the middle of one for even a few seconds? You would not want to watch a feature length version of that with special effects and shaky cam. Bear in mind, I love a shaky cam and grade on a curve, but even I could not get into it.
Earth to Echo feels derivative. It hits a lot of ET notes without the successful emotional manipulation. Thankfully they were decent children unlike the terrors from The Tree of Life otherwise that little alien would be dead, but one kid has his demented moments of believing that he is hitting and helping. The child actors were uneven. I could feel the demographic gears working as the filmmakers dutifully checked off diversity boxes, including the Smurfette of the group.
I am slightly impressed that Earth to Echo found a way to simultaneously make the black kid, Tuck, the protagonist, narrator and filmmaker yet he still ended up a supporting character in his own movie because he mostly stays behind the camera, and the true heart of the movie is Alex, a foster kid and the sweetest kid of the group though Munch is a close second and would be me though I am not as technically proficient. Almost all of Tuck’s storylines end up being resolved through Alex: dealing with moving, getting a girl to like him, the connection between the alien and the phone. I actually do not care but am I the only one who noticed? To be fair, the kid playing Alex, Teo Halm, is a better actor than Astro, aka Brian Bradley Jr., who plays Tuck, in this particular movie so I did not mind, but still. (Side note: Astro’s acting career and the quality of his acting seems to comparatively skyrocket after this film. Even though I did not recognize him, he subsequently appears in A Walk Among the Tombstones and Luce.)
Diversity is not just having girls/women and people of color appear on screen. It is about those girls and people of color being more than the person who exists simply to make the white characters’ lives better. With Tuck, I feel as if the filmmakers initially tried because they show his family and the interpersonal dynamic, but they could not sustain it. Also I know that black people are not a monolith, but Tuck’s family would not act like that—ignoring what their kid did and said then lavish all their attention on the older, jock son. The writer probably wrote the role, but never checked with any black people to see if it was realistic. Black parents are hyper vigilant about where their kids go, who they are hanging out with and what they will be doing. I do not care if those parents were born in the US or another country. I appreciate that the casting director decided to do a little race bending and translated a kid into black kid, but a little retrofitting would have made the story slightly credible.
Similarly Emma gets added into the mix, but the filmmakers did not seem to think further than checking off the need for a girl. In Stephen King’s It, there is a reason that the girl hung out with boys whereas in this film, she already has a set of close friends before she apparently defects to the boys’ group. Her parents are shown pressuring her to do something gender normative related to class, but it still would not explain why a girl would run off with boys that she earlier expressed disdain when talking to one, which was a hilarious and clever scene so I am not suggesting that it get excised, but reconciled with the rest of the movie. When she is added to the group, her contributions to the quest appear to be quite substantive yet the filmmakers decide it is the one time when Tuck will default to the “Ew, girls” behavior when he deletes that footage, which is inconsistent with everything that he did before. We get it. It is a boys’ movie, but if you can snag a few girls’ bucks with token representation, you will take it. The writers never thought cohesively about the characters’ psychological profile. Are the boys into girls or not? Was the deletion an act of jealousy? Then how does that explain the final montage since the deletion occurred after the events of the movie ended and during editing? Theoretically there is a better version of Earth to Echo where the girl section was not deleted.
Earth to Echo’s best asset is its alien. The film is suitably scary as the kids start their quest. Usually found footage and fake documentaries also fall into the horror genre so I was not surprised by that atmospheric twist. The alien is adorable, but I have questions for those who saw the movie. Was Echo a pilot carrying other similar aliens or alone because it looked like the prior? I am probably the only one more interested in Echo than the kids. When the film shows Munch’s room, the radio mentions a wormhole, and I briefly got excited that it was going to later tie into learning more about Echo, but nope.
If you do see Earth to Echo, definitely stay because there is a post credits scene. This scene clearly begs studios to create a franchise and give viewers a sequel. I am only one viewer and certainly not the target demographic, but on behalf of the adults who would have to accompany a kid to the theater to watch it, one was more than enough. Please no more. Skip it!