Earth To Echo

Earth to Echo is something resembling a coming of age story with a sci-fi background. These kids, who have always been nobodies help an alien to assemble a spaceship and take off. Along the way they run into the usual assortment of characters that make their lives more difficult. Stereotypically, all the adults are bad guys who want to stop the alien from leaving Earth. These adults chase down the kids, and want to use their rapport with the alien to make it trust them before they can shut it down. Having all the adults be negative characters really rubbed me the wrong way, and I couldn't enjoy the movie.

The worst thing about this movie is that it was shot Blair Witch style with video cameras being a part of the scene, and when the characters run, the video cameras run and bounce all over the place. It really left me feeling nauseous. My stomach and eyes are still upset.  One of the characters is obsessed with getting a video that will go youtube-viral, and the others comment on this obsession and the presence of video cameras a few times.

Another major problem is that I was bored. The characters seemed to be saying things that kids say. Nothing seemed particularly out of character, but a lot of the dialog was just boring. For instance, as shown in the clip at the top of this review, one of the characters scares another by jumping on his shoulders. The boy responds by jumping and saying, "you'll give me a heart attack one day," which strikes me as the most stereotypical response you could possibly have at that moment and seems wasted in a film.

I think they tried to put suspense into the film by having the adult character try to stop them from building a spaceship but it didn't really work. At no point in the film did I wonder whether this spaceship was going to be built. Clearly they just had to get there through a lot of banter and boring writing.

Overall I give it a C-. At least it tried.