Pablo Arellano SpataroTold with depth and nuance, Oscar winner Mark Boal’s (The Hurt Locker) new AppleTV + series Echo 3 (premieres Wednesday, Nov. 23) is a high-paced story of two soldiers on a very personal rescue mission.
Based on the premise of the hit Israeli Netflix series When Heroes Fly, which was also based loosely on the late Israeli journalist Amir Gutfreund’s novel about childhood friends from Haifa who reunite to rescue their female friend from a religious cult, Boal takes the concept at the heart of these stories and modernizes it, making it about American Special Ops forces instead of the IDF, and setting it in current times, under different political circumstances.
Other than the original idea of a brother and love interest from the same army unit (in When Heroes Fly, she was an ex-girlfriend) teaming up to rescue the woman closest to them from Colombia, Echo 3 stands on its own in terms of its absorbing storytelling and vivid character development. Here, the woman in question is a newlywed doctor named Amber (Jessica Ann Collins), with obvious secrets of her own and a traumatic past, who has traveled to South America to do medicinal research on natural hallucinogens. Not long into her study, she and her research team are kidnapped by revolutionaries. Negotiations for her release go awry when the local kidnappers find a military-grade beacon sewed into her backpack unknowingly by her Special Forces husband, nicknamed Prince (Game of Thrones‘ Michiel Huisman), who has already noticed the missing beacon and arrived in Colombia with Bambi (Luke Evans), her brother, in hopes of saving her.
What makes Echo 3 really stand apart is the striking cinematography and realism; when Prince and Bambi arrive in Colombia, they don’t just show up guns blazing, despite the fact that secret military operations are what they do for a living. Boal makes it clear in a subtle way that there is still a chain of command and orders to be followed, or at the very least said out loud for show. (There’s even a joke during negotiations between Amber and the female revolutionaries about how “This isn’t Jason Bourne.”) First, Prince and Bambi laboriously wade through the bureaucracy that is the U.S. Embassy and attempt to negotiate Amber’s release. When that doesn’t work, they try to piggyback onto local government orders. Things never go quite as planned, and there is always a seesaw and tension of how much they are allowed to do without getting into trouble or getting innocent people killed as collateral damage.
Right away it’s clear that getting Amber to safety will not be so easy, and as the challenges continue, viewers get an eyeful of the beauty (and chaos) that is South America.
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