Having a friend light-years away taught us that distance is just a state of mind.

Earth to Echo

(2014)

Explorers meets E.T. meets Chronicle meets the mechanical owl from the Ray Harryhausen Clash of the Titans. Earth to Echo is nothing if not derivative, but Dave Green’s feature debut is nevertheless reasonably engaging in spite of itself. The only one of the above influences that really works against it (complaining that a movie is like E.T. is complaining that archetypal stories get told) is the found footage conceit. It’s wholly a gimmick, and one the kids appear to have augmented with Pro Tools, adding a cloyingly instructive voiceover (in case the youngsters are unable to get the message) and an unnecessary score that attempts to evoke wide-eyed wonderment.

The voiceover suggests another ‘80s influence, Rob Reiner’s Stand by Me, playing into the nostalgic hue of a last momentous summer spent together before childhood friends go their separate ways. Unfortunately, the gravitas of Richard Dreyfus (as the grown-up Wil Wheaton) is absent here, even by equivalence, replaced by Tuck’s video narrative. Astro (how long before he goes back to plain old Brian Bradley?) played Liam Neeson’s impossibly smart street kid sidekick in A Walk Among the Tombstones, and his character is similarly cocksure here. His commentary is replete with unearned wisdom. It’s as problematic as the found footage (complete with far too many “authentic” recording freezes and recording cuts), such that it’s really down to screenwriter Henry Gayden borrowing liberally from strong sources that renders the picture passable.

The young leads offer variable performances, required to be naturalistic but lacking the range to pull this off. None of the young actors are actually bad, but only Ella Wahlestedt as Emma, the honorary girl and latecomer to the group, has the air of a confident performer. Reese Hartwig is Munch, nominally the oddball science geek (the River Phoenix character from Explorers rather than the pugilist of Stand By Me) but is really just a touch quirky. He’s also abandoned the plot in favour of Alex (Teo Halm). Halm is the least impressive, the foster kid given hang-ups about being left alone in the least subtle of ways.

The boys’ neighbourhood, Mulberry Woods, is due to be demolished to service the construction of a highway. It’s the final week before their enforced move and electronic signals playing havoc with residents. Munch tracks the signal (much as Phoenix led the way with deductions in Explorers) to a spot in the desert where they discover a cute little robot that just wants to get home (so, E.T.). To facilitate this they must evade government agents who want to get their hands on Echo (as they christen him). So, E.T. again. Also E.T. again, the not-quite The Creation of Adam-inspired poster.

The borrowing from Chronicle is most obvious in the video footage (although that film did it so well one forgot about it for the most part), but also surfaces in the underground spaceship of the third act. It’s curious that so many filmmakers choose found footage as a stylistic and narrative form, since it so rarely inspired or appropriate. One can only guess it’s partly down to insecurity on their part. If a film is “supposed” to look scrappy and amateurish at least the director can’t be accused of making a hash of things. Dave Green has secured the gig on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2, so something must have impressed someone (either that or, equally likely, it is some form of punishment on those who liked the first instalment). There’s no good reason for its presence in Earth to Echo, and it would be a better movie without it.

Echo is expectedly adorable, with an effectively chirrupy sound design that elicits oohs and aahs. He’s overtly owl-like, bearing more than a passing resemblance to Archimedes in the 1981 Clash of the Titans (who was that film’s nod to R2D2), but curiously he isn’t an especially prominent character. Following the initial discovery, there is much chasing about and pursuing of goals (the picture clocks in at a crisp 80 minutes, shorn of credits) but not so much in the way of lovable hijinks. The effects are reasonable for the limited budget, which may explain the robot’s limited screen time (Echo’s dismantling and reconstruction of an oncoming truck is more effective for the idea than the realisation).

There are a few amusing moments that suggest this could have been quicker and wittier with a bit more care. Munch’s offers a disarming compliment to the mystified proprietor of a pawn shop (“Excuse me, sir, you have a very very lovely shop”) and his response on being asked “What was that?” as musical instruments on display start sounding off is the literal “F sharp?” There’s also a scene in a bar that begins well but can’t sustain itself.

One’s enjoyment of this picture will chiefly largely depend on tolerance levels for copious handheld camera and also kids being let loose to act like kids. Fortunately the latter never devolves into a Goonies-esque display of incessant shouting and screaming – although it gets close on occasion – but you’d be forgiven for giving up during the first 10 minutes as the cumulative factors quickly prove wearing. Perhaps the makers realised that, without the gimmick, the movie would look like even more of an ‘80s homage than Super 8 (which is saying something), but that isn’t an especially good reason for it. Earth to Echo is well meaning and inoffensive, but it suffers by comparison with its influences. It lacks either the arch-manipulation of Spielberg’s E.T. (being told that best friends will always be together no matter where they are in the universe is trite rather than sincere, or even ‘berg-ishly treacly) or the out-of-leftfield anarchy that explodes from Dante’s Explorers.

Comments

He’s probably paranoid, high-strung, doesn’t like daylight. You know, has a lot of crumbs in his beard, if he has a beard.

Godzilla vs. Kong (2021) (SPOILERS) I’d like to report I had a blast with Godzilla vs. Kong . It’s lighter on its oversized, city-stomping feet than its slog of a MonsterVerse predecessor, Godzilla: King of the Monsters , and there are flashes of visual inspiration along with several engaging core ideas (which, to be fair, the series had already laid the seeds for). But this sequel still stumbles in its chief task: assembling an engaging, lively story that successfully integrates both tiny humans and towering titans.

It's Dark Age, by Jupiter!

The Dig (2021) (SPOILERS) An account of the greatest archaeological find Britain would know until Professor Horner opened the barrow at Devil’s End. And should you scoff at such “ fiction ”, that’s nothing on this adaptation of John Preston’s 2007 novel concerning the Sutton Hoo excavations of the late 1930s. The Dig , as is the onus of any compelling fictional account, takes liberties with the source material, but the erring from the straight and narrow in this case is less an issue than the shift in focus from characters and elements successfully established during the first hour.

Our "Bullshit!" team has unearthed spectacular new evidence, which suggests, that Jack the Ripper was, in fact, the Loch Ness Monster.

Amazon Women on the Moon (1987) Cheeseburger Film Sandwich . Apparently, that’s what the French call Amazon Women on the Moon . Except that it probably sounds a little more elegant, since they’d be saying it in French (I hope so, anyway). Given the title, it should be no surprise that it is regarded as a sequel to Kentucky Fried Movie . Which, in some respects, it is. John Landis originally planned to direct the whole of Amazon Women himself, but brought in other directors due to scheduling issues. The finished film is as much of a mess as Kentucky Fried Movie , arrayed with more miss sketches than hit ones, although it’s decidedly less crude and haphazard than the earlier picture. Some have attempted to reclaim Amazon Women as a dazzling satire on TV’s takeover of our lives, but that’s stretching it. There is a fair bit of satire in there, but the filmmakers were just trying to be funny; there’s no polemic or express commentary. But even on such moderate t

You stink, my friend.

Mulan (2020) (SPOILERS) Let that be a lesson to Disney. It’s a fool’s errand to try and beat the Chinese at their own game, no matter how painstakingly respectful – or rather, pandering – you are. Indeed, Mulan ’s abysmal $40m box office take in the country – where it did get a proper release, so no plandemic excuses can be cited – feels like a direct rebuke; don’t try and tell us how to suck eggs. There’s an additional explanation too, of course. That Mulan sucks.

Wow. Asteroids are made of farts. Okay. I got it.

Greenland (2020) (SPOILERS) Global terror porn for overpopulation adherents as Gerard Butler and his family do their darnedest to reach the safety of a bunker in the titular country in the face of an imminent comet impact. Basically, what if 2012 were played straight? These things come to test cinemas in cycles, of course. Sean Connery struggled with a duff rug and a stack of mud in Meteor , while Deep Impact plumbed for another dread comet and Armageddon an asteroid. The former, owing to the combined forces of Bruce Joel Rubin and Michael Tolkin, was a – relatively – more meditative fare. The latter was directed by Michael Bay. And then there’s Roland Emmerich, who having hoisted a big freeze on us in The Day After Tomorrow then wreaked a relatively original source of devastation in the form of 2012 ’s overheating Earth’s core. Greenland , meanwhile, is pretty much what you’d expect from the director of Angel Has Fallen .

Roswell was a smokescreen, we've had a half a dozen better salvage operations.

The X-Files 1.24: The Erlenmeyer Flask The Erlenmeyer Flask makes for a fast-paced, tense and eventful ride, but does it make any sense? That less than mattered at the time, but revisiting the mythology arc (for probably the fourth or fifth time) reveals increasingly tenuous internal coherence as the various conspiracy elements begin to pile up and the situations become ever-more convoluted. This will become the Chris Carter’s signature: don’t examine the details too closely, go with the flow. Trust Chris implicitly.

UFO IN MOSSINGHAM?

A Shaun the Sheep Movie: Farmageddon (2020) (SPOILERS) One might reasonably suggest the recourse of the ailing or desperate franchise is to resort, seemingly out of nowhere, to space aliens. Even Police Academy didn’t go that far (to Moscow, yes, but not to space). Perhaps animators think kids have no skills of discernment and will swallow any old sugar-coated crap. Perhaps they don’t, and they will. Ice Age had been enjoying absurd success until Collision Course sent Scrat spinning into the cosmos and grosses tumbled. Shaun the Sheep has been around for a quarter of a century, but this is only his second movie outing and already he’s pulling an E.T. on us. Of course, this may all be part of the grand scheme, and Nick Park is simply doing his bit to familiarise the tots in time for Project Blue Beam.

Careful how much boat you’re eating.

Onward (2020) (SPOILERS) Pixar’s Bright , or thereabouts. The interesting thing – perhaps the only interesting thing – about Onward is that it’s almost indiscernible from a DreamWorks Animation effort, where once they cocked a snook at such cheap-seats fare, seeing themselves as better class of animation house altogether. Just about everything in Onward is shamelessly derivative, from the Harry Potter /fantasy genre cash-in to the use of the standard Pixar formula whereby any scenario remotely eccentric or exotic is buried beneath the banal signifiers of modern society: because anything you can imagine must be dragged down to tangible everyday reference points or kids won’t be able to assimilate it. And then there’s the choice of lead voices, in-Disney star-slaves Chris Pratt and Tom Holland.

By heaven, I’d thrash the life out of you… if I didn’t have to read the Nine O’Clock News.

The Green Man (1956) (SPOILERS) The Green movie from Launder and Gilliat starring Alastair Sim that isn’t Green for Danger. Which is to say, The Green Man can’t quite scale the heady heights of that decade-earlier murder mystery triumph, but neither is it any slouch. Sim is the antagonist this time – albeit a very affable, Sim-ish one – and his sometime protégée, a young George Cole, the hero. If the plot is entirely absurd, Robert Day’s movie wastes no time probing such insufficiencies, ensuring it is very funny, lively and beautifully performed.

Well, I’ll be damned. It’s the gentleman guppy.

Waterworld (1995) (SPOILERS) The production and budgetary woes of “ Kevin’s Gate ” will forever overshadow the movie’s content (and while it may have been the most expensive movie ever to that point – adjusted for inflation, it seems only Cleopatra came close – it has since turned a profit). However, should you somehow manage to avoid the distraction of those legendary problems, the real qualitative concerns are sure to come sailing over the cognitive horizon eventually; Waterworld is just so damned derivative. It’s a seafaring Mad Max. Peter Rader, who first came up with the idea in 1986, admitted as much. David Twohy, who later came aboard, also cited Mad Max 2 ; that kind of rip-off aspect – Jaws birthing Piranha – makes it unsurprising Waterworld was once under consideration by Roger Corman (he couldn’t cost it cheaply enough). Ultimately, there’s never a sufficient sense the movie has managed to become its own thing. Which is a bummer, because it’s frequently quite good fun.

Now In Full Color, with a Happier Ending

Search This Blog