Earth to Echo is a 2014 American science fiction film directed by Dave Green, and produced by Ryan Kavanaugh and Andrew Panay. Based on a screenplay by Henry Gayden, the film stars Teo Halm, Brian "Astro" Bradley, Reese C. Hartwig and Ella Wahlestedt as four neighborhood friends who find a robotic, telekinetic alien in the desert, and are soon hunted by dangerous forces who seek to take the alien, who the kids name "Echo", for themselves. The film is shot in a found footage style from many perspectives, including through a handheld camera, smartphone cameras, and the robot's eyes.[3]
The film was originally developed and produced by the Walt Disney Company, under the leadership of Rich Ross, but Disney, unsatisfied with the project, sold the distribution rights to Relativity Media in 2013, on the advice of producer Andrew Panay.[4] Relativity Media theatrically released the film in the United States on July 2, 2014. Earth to Echo received mixed reviews from critics and grossed $45.3 million worldwide.
Plot
Three childhood friends, Alex, Tuck, and Munch, live in a small Nevada neighborhood that will soon be demolished for a highway construction project. The day before they're set to move, their phones all start displaying mysterious patterns, which Munch discovers lead to coordinates in the nearby desert. They decide to spend their last night together biking to the coordinates to investigate, recording their experience on their smartphones and video cameras.
The three arrive at the coordinates and follow the map to a dusty, rusted object under an electrical tower. They take the object with them as they follow another map to a nearby barn, where the object telekinetically repairs itself using various objects around the barn. The boys discover the object contains a cyberneticalien that can answer yes or no questions. The alien reveals it is from another planet and has crash landed on Earth after being shot down and is seriously injured as a result. The group follows another map to a pawn shop, where the object further repairs itself. With its eyes damaged, it uses Alex's phone camera to see. As they leave the pawn shop, they decide to name the alien Echo.
They follow another map to the house of Emma, a classmate of the boys, who discovers Echo and joins their group. They follow another map to an arcade, where Alex is caught by a security guard. Emma goes back to rescue him while Echo causes a distraction. After rescuing Alex, the four stop at a restaurant, keeping Echo hidden in a backpack, but a construction worker steals the backpack and loads it into a truck. Munch jumps into the back of the truck as it pulls away, leaving the rest of the group behind. To catch up to them, Alex and Emma help Tuck steal his brother's car, which they drive to the construction site where Munch and Echo are being held.
The three sneak in, but get caught by the same construction worker, who reveals himself as Dr. Lawrence Masden, a scientist who intends to keep Echo on Earth so that he can study its technology. Masden's group is revealed as the group that shot Echo down in the first place. Masden tries to convince the kids that if Echo repairs the key to his spaceship and takes off in it, it will kill everyone in the neighborhood; the kids pretend to be convinced, and promise to help Masden find the spaceship if he takes them to Munch and Echo. Masden brings the three to a scrap junkyard, where Echo seemingly dies as a result of the violent experimentation inflicted on him, but with encouragement from the kids, he revives, completes his repairs, and distracts the agents long enough for the kids to drive back home. At Alex's house, the spaceship key goes into the ground by itself, and they realize the agents invented the false construction project as a cover to dig up the neighborhood, as the entire ship is in the ground beneath it.
Trusting Echo, Alex takes him down the hole made by the key. At the bottom, the group finds a room that turns out to be the spaceship's core, where the key connects to the rest of it. Once the key is connected to the core, allowing Echo to use it to pilot the ship, he begins starting up the ship. After they all say goodbye and the kids exit the core, the ship's separate parts telekinetically come out of the ground all over the neighborhood, and reassemble it in mid-air, and all without destroying the neighborhood. Once fully reassembled, the ship then flies away. The project put on by the agents is abandoned but Alex and Munch relocate anyway, as their families have already bought new homes elsewhere. However, as Tuck's didn't, he stays, and new neighbors and residents move in to the neighborhood. Sometime later, the three and Emma meet up again, as the film ends with Alex holding up his phone towards the sky.
In a post-credit scene, Alex addresses his friends as his phone apparently starts moving and glitching out like before, implying that Echo has returned.
Earth to Echo was commissioned by Andrew Panay, Panay Films President of Production, under the working title, Untitled Wolf Adventure, while the studio shifted leadership between Rich Ross and Alan Horn. After Horn's succession as chairman, and viewing a final cut of the film, he decided to put the film into turnaround. After producer Andrew Panay met with Relativity president Tucker Tooley, Disney eventually sold the film's distribution rights and copyrights to Relativity Media in 2013.[5]
The film was initially scheduled for release on January 10, 2014, and April 25, 2014.[6] After being delayed, Earth to Echo premiered on June 14, 2014, at the Los Angeles Film Festival and opened in theaters across the U.S. on July 2, 2014.
Earth to Echo opened on July 2, 2014, in the United States in 3,179 theaters, ranking at #6, and accumulating $8,364,658 over its 3-day opening weekend (an average of $2,590 per venue) and $13,567,557 since its Wednesday launch. As of 27 December 2014[update], the film had grossed $38.9 million in the U.S. and $6.4 million overseas, for a total of $45.3 million worldwide, against a $13 million budget, making it a moderate box office success.[1]
Critical reception
On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 50% of 128 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 5.3/10. The website's consensus reads: "Earth to Echo doesn't do itself any favors by beggaring comparison to E.T., but for younger viewers, it should prove a reasonably entertaining diversion."[8]Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 53 out of 100, based on 31 critics, indicating "mixed or average" reviews.[9] Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "A−" on an A+ to F scale.[10]
