Earth to Echo

I read reviews about Earth to Echo last year. It was a movie by an unknown director with unknown casts (except for one of the supporting cast, who is one of the actors from Monk). I remember the reviewer describing the movie as something like Steven Spielberg’s E.T. The show is basically about a group of kids helping an extra-terrestrial find its way back home.

The movie began by showing a group of three friends lamenting on how they have to move because of the construction of a highway that bypasses their neighbourhood. One of the characters, Tuck, is a budding filmmaker who captures on video the workers at the construction house near his house. One of the things he mentions at the start caught my attention. He said, “Why do you need to build a freeway through our houses? Can’t you go around it?” He summed it up by saying how powerless he and his friends felt. “We can’t do anything, we’re just kids.” The pessimist in me was thinking, “Even we adults can’t do anything when big money comes to disrupt our home and the environment.” It’s not a happy thought but in that sense the movie connects with reality.

Anyways, I couldn’t stay depressed for long because pretty soon, the boys, Tuck, Munch and Alex gather when they find something wrong with their smartphones. A seemingly random, abstract image appears when they come near Alex’s house. No phone technician can explain what’s wrong with the phone. They checked the forums and online and didn’t find anything until Munch came across a map of the desert which surprisingly, matches the image on their phones! Things were bumpy before they even started their journey and they even had to sneak into the house of a girl who happened to be one of their schoolmate. Boys being boys, they were reluctant to let her join them once she found out what they were up to but after saving them from further interrogation from a suspicious construction worker, they let her join. Not that they had a choice anyways. She was pretty adamant about joining them on their mission. Thus the four of them began their crazy adventure.

What I liked about the story is that it shows how you can achieve something that seems impossible as long as you have your friends, courage and a sense of adventure. Of course, the journey will have its challenges and tensions but what matters is how you learn from it. I like these quotes at the end of the movie:

“I don’t really know how to say goodbye, so I’m not gonna and you’re my friend you know. Even when I’m old, even when you think I’d forgotten I’m always gonna be there.”- Alex.

“When you’re a kid, you think you’re invisible. We didn’t think we could make a difference. We’re not kids anymore. We know now that we can do anything.

Having a friend light years away taught us that distance is just a state of mind. If you’re best friends, then you will always be best friends, no matter where you are in the universe.” – Tuck.