We stand on the shoulders of giants, but some of us still can’t really reach anything. Such is the case with Ben Medina and his debut feature film ECCO, a film clearly made with the intention of having its director be considered in the running for “next Nolan or “next Mann”. To be fair, this goal, however unreachable it may be, is common and genuinely helpful for a young filmmaker to aspire to.
As Kevin Smith has said, Linklater’s Slacker was the film that kicked him in the ass and made him itch to make his own feature. We should all find a movie like that and Christopher Nolan’s Following is a perfect candidate for the 21st century filmmaker. Made for only 6,000 and with a group of his own friends, it’s the perfect high-concept low-budget darling that can draw eyeballs to an up-and-coming writer-director with minimal financial sacrifices.
Inspiration is Not Enough
Technology has gotten much better since Nolan made Following in 1999 and so have resources. Medina has more at his disposal with his first feature than Nolan had with his, but the difference here lies in old-fashioned “know-how”. ECCO is poorly written and poorly executed. It looks better in its pitch, its publicity stills and its Wikipedia summary than it does as an actual script or completed film. For a debut filmmaker, this shouldn’t be a surprise.
ECCO tries to create its own Jason Bourne in the central character Michael (Lathrop Walker), a strong silent type who is living with a dark secret from his past that even he doesn’t know. He is a contract killer but he doesn’t really know who he has killed, he only knows that a shadowy group called Corpus are after him for killing someone. He had a beautiful blonde girlfriend, Aubrey (Helena Grace Donald), who ends up being tracked down and killed, and he replaces her with another beautiful blonde woman named Abby (Tabitha Bastien), who he meets at a dockside bar. Oh, she also has a kid and is married but decides to run off with Michael anyway after an incredibly awkward ten-minute conversation.
A Great Camera is Not Enough Either
The shots and landscapes feature high-contrast lighting and meticulously curated art direction to make everything look ‘pristine’ and ‘perfect’. It’s a veritable Instagram grid of high-definition photography. Trying to match this brooding atmosphere, the movie has all of its actors, none of whom are very convincing, talking in half-sentences, fragments, and trying to make thumping closure statements at each other that don’t tie back in any meaningful way to the central points of their conversations. It’s a film that desperately needs to feign intelligence and posture its way through to a convoluted narrative that is barely tied together.
The non-linear, layered narrative, which tries to imitate Nolan’s slow methodical reveals of character like in The Dark Knight Rises, is poorly constructed together, like puzzle-pieces are hammered in to fit next to each other even when they don’t belong there. Ben Medina seems completely unsure of his own ability to communicate basic plot-points to lead the audience through a trail of breadcrumbs to his unqualified twist ending. It’s why sequences are constantly repeated and recycled. There is an overcompensation of information to remind us of things that happened minutes ago. Characters make the same points at each other multiple times with different phrasing.
I think Medina know this though. He knows the script is thin, he knows the concept isn’t enough to fill two-hours and so his decisions to repeat these sequences are conscious and thinly-veiled in their attempts to eat more runtime. As a debut filmmaker, he becomes obsessed with the beauty of his own shots. A sun-bleached sex sequence between his central hero and his hot girlfriend is repeated over and over, justified as a “flashback” sequence while the assassins from Corpus are holding Michael captive.
In Conclusion: Ecco
Thrillers don’t need high budgets and fancy technology to look cool anymore, and ECCO is a testament to that. What can’t be made up for however is good writing and a visual instinct to know how to communicate ideas, references, and clues to the audience and build trust and keep them interested.
ECCO was released in theaters in the US on August 9th, 2019. For all international release dates, see here.
Watch Ecco
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