Earth to Echo is a 2014 American found footagescience fiction film directed by Dave Green, and produced by Ryan Kavanaugh and Andrew Panay. The film was originally developed and produced by Walt Disney Pictures, which later sold the distribution rights to Relativity Media, which released the film in theaters on July 2, 2014. The film is shot in a found footage style through many perspectives, as the story revolves around four neighborhood friends who find a robotic, telekinetic alien in the desert they call Echo while being hunted by dangerous forces who will stop at nothing to get their hands on the innocent creature.
Plot
Three neighborhood teens and childhood friends, Alex, Tuck, and Munch, are upset by the fact that their neighborhood, Mulberry Woods, Nevada, is going to be demolished, allegedly for a new highway construction project, and they all have to move away because of it. One day, each of their phones start glitching out, displaying seemingly random graphical patterns. The kids soon find out, through Munch, the patterns are actually the depictions of a spot in the desert that is 17.6 miles away. Realizing this all must mean something, they decide to spend their last night together by going into the desert on their bikes to investigate, disguising their trip as a sleepover while recording the experience on various cameras. Tuck, Alex, and Munch eventually make it to the area in the desert and follow the map to a dusty, rusted object under an electrical tower. Tuck, confused, decides to abruptly call it off when the object starts to copy Alex's ringtone, and they follow another map to a barn. There the object starts to repair itself, the process involving telekinetically taking various objects, altering them, and attaching them to itself, and the boys find it contains a cybernetic alien. After they determine it can answer questions with "Yes" or "No" answers, they learn it is from another world, has accidentally crash landed after being shot down by an unknown force on Earth and is seriously injured. The group soon follow another map to a pawn shop, where the object further repairs itself, allowing the alien to reveal itself. With its eyes damaged, it uses Alex's phone camera to "see" and befriend the three. While in an alley, they decide to name the alien "Echo." Looking for more parts to repair Echo's object, they again follow another map to a house where Emma, a teenage girl who goes to their high school, lives and finds out about Echo. Emma soon joins the team as they go to a bar, then an arcade, to allow the object to keep repairing itself while Emma finds out the object is not merely a spaceship, but a key to one. At the arcade, Alex is caught by a security guard. Although Tuck and Munch suspect Alex allowed himself to be caught because he is angry at Tuck for accidentally abandoning him, Emma goes back in to rescue Alex, with Echo helping by causing a distraction for the security guard. Stopping at a restaurant, the four talk and reconcile before a "construction worker" arrives, and after using an unknown device, takes the backpack with Echo inside and loads it into a truck. Munch leaps into the back of the truck just as it pulls out of the restaurant parking lot, leaving the rest behind. Tuck, Alex and Emma then go to a party hosted by the girlfriend of Tuck's brother where they steal his car to catch up with Munch and Echo. The group find the "construction site" where Munch is being interrogated and Echo is being experimented on, but get caught by the same construction worker. The construction worker, revealed to be a scientist named Dr. Lawrence Masden, ruthlessly explains to them that he and his group shot down Echo when he came to Earth, and intend to prevent him from going home so they can study Echo's technology. They also believe that if the spaceship of which the key is for, wherever it is, takes off, it will kill the neighborhood residents. After the kids lie and say they will help find Echo's spaceship, they are taken to a scrap junkyard. There, 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. Making it to Alex's home, the spaceship key goes into the ground, and they realize the agents invented the false construction project as a cover to dig up the neighborhood, as the entire ship, however it got there, 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 scene after the credits, Alex addresses his friends as his phone apparently starts to move and glitch out, a sign that Echo may return.
Earth to Echo was commissioned by Sean Bailey, Walt Disney Studios' 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.
Distribution
Release
The film was initially scheduled for release on January 10, 2014 and April 25, 2014. 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.
Marketing
The first trailer was released on December 12, 2013.
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 and $13,567,557 since its Wednesday launch., 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.
Critical reception
website Rotten Tomatoes summarized the critical response: "Earth to Echo doesn't do itself any favors by beggaring comparisons to E.T., but for younger viewers, it should prove a reasonably entertaining diversion". The website surveyed 124 critics with a determined rating average of 5.37 out of 10. The website had assigned the film a score of 51%. Another aggregator Metacritic surveyed 31 critics and gave the film a score of 53 out of 100, which indicate "mixed or average reviews".
