review:Earth to Echo

Review: Earth to Echo

Directed by Dave Green

Starring

Teo Halm as Alex Nichols
Brian "Astro" Bradley as Tuck Simms
Reese Hartwig as Reginald "Munch" Barrett
Ella Wahlestedt as Emma




Earth to Echo is a science fiction movie telling the coming of age tale of a small group of boy (ultimately joined by a girl) living in a desert suburb.

Early on cell phones begin to malfunction and showing odd graphics which appear to be maps.

What the boy ultimately find, by following the maps, is a piece of junk which they find, holds a heavily damaged mechanical life-form bent (sorry) on recovering a long lost ship. 

Well I won't play the spoiler for those that want to watch the movie.   But consider, Earth to Echo is one of the most derivative movies I have seen to date.   It contains elements from ET, Batteries Not Included, Star Man, Flight of the Navigator  and a host of others. 

The history of this film speaks volumes.  Here is what Wikipedia says about Echo:

• Earth to Echo is a 2014 American found footage science fiction adventure film directed by Dave Green, and produced by Robbie Brenner and Andrew Panay. The film was originally developed and produced by Walt Disney Pictures, who eventually sold the distribution rights to Relativity Media, which released the completed film in theaters on July 2, 2014.

Pretty much tells me Disney knew that they had a brown steamer mid-way threw the development and excuse the pun, but they dropped it.    The Disney hand is clear in most of the film.  They took all the part that they figured worked and threw them in a hat and shook liberally.

I mean, you have a bunch of pre-teen kids on bikes.  They live in a housing development where all the houses look the same.   Through misadventure they come in contact with an alien that want to get home.  A bad ole government agency is bent on capturing the alien for own nefarious reasons and I am not even talking about Earth to Echo!

If you are under 10 years old, you might just enjoy the film, but otherwise it is a hopeless waste of time.   Out of ten?  5.