"Earth to Echo" (2014) REVIEW

When I saw the full trailer for this movie, my expectations weren't necessarily high.

When forced to move out of there neighborhood, 13 year olds Tuck, Alex, and Munch decide to spend their last night together to do something big: follow the maps they received on there phones. The maps lead them into the desert where they find an injured alien they name Echo. Echo, with the ability to manipulate electronics and mechanical objects, gives the kids a set of maps on their phones which leads to parts of machines he needs to repair his ship. The boys are thrust into a high stakes scavenger hunt, trying to understand Echo and hide him from the authorities who threaten his existence.

In a basic sense, Earth to Echo is a modernized found-footage E.T. Overall, the movie works well for its target audience, but not much farther than that. The dialogue is rather corny at times and the chemistry between the actors are just above tolerable. A problem I had with the movie was that I noticed, as a found-footage movie, in some scenes that there were more camera angles than there were cameras (for example, in one scene, one camera was in the vicinity but we were seeing the scene from three angles instead of one).

Given these problems, though, the pacing was great and it carried some amazing moments. Overall, Earth to Echo is a decent kids movie I'd see again.

3/5 Stars

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