Earth to Echo

2014 kiddie sci-fi adventure

Rating: 10/20 (Abbey: 11/20; Buster: not rating)

Plot: Thanks to a new highway project running through their neighborhood, a group of friends are forced to scatter. They decide to have one last adventure together after their cellphones go wacko. They meet a new little buddy and decide to help him. . .well, return home.

Does that all sound familiar? Look at that poster up there. Now, look at this one:

They're not even trying to hide the fact that they're wanting to make a 21st Century E.T. update, are they? I had no interest in watching this, and to be completely fair, I'm just not the audience for a movie like this. This is for children who are the age I was when E.T. or Goonies came out. There's a little of a found footage thing going on here as the trio of boys and eventually a girl--almost as an afterthought, like the writers thought, "Whoops! Why would girls want to see this movie? We should probably put one in the movie."--do all of the camera work. It's all so modern--Youtubing, spy glass cams, text messages--that it's bound to annoy a curmudgeon like me. The child actors are just as good as you'd expect them to be in something that's supposed to be as realistic as this, and the story, especially when the villain (Jason Gray-Stanford, who manages to out-bad-act the kids somehow) finishes materializing, doesn't feel original at all. You know how it's all going to end, and there's not enough going on to make you really care how it all gets there. I thought the special effects were really good. They consisted mostly of random things flying around while the children and any other characters in the vicinity reacted loudly, but they meshed with the realism of the found footage stuff pretty well. The biggest problem may have been that the alien thing, eventually named Echo, looked like a trinket you could find in the clearance aisle of a toy store after Christmas more than something with a smidgen of humanity or anything that makes certain viewers fall in love and want to root for him like an E.T. or a Mac. Echo just sort of feels like a prop. There are definitely less-annoying movies you can watch with your children.

There's a sequence involving a truck in this that might be the dumbest thing I've ever seen, by the way.