I wanted to love Earth to Echo: it has found footage scifi, a group of rambunctious kids, a good score, and a lovable Wall-E-esque robot. Sadly, it's just not good and, more importantly, unneeded. Despite some decent humor and some fun in the scifi action, it brings little new to the kids-on-an-adventure genre. It's at best bland and at worst annoying; awkwardly performed, style-less, and forgettable. It's the story of three pre-teen friends in a town being leveled by a mysterious government project. They spend their last night together on one final adventure, befriending an alien robot. If E2E's plot sounds familiar, that's because it's a shameless mix of E.T. and The Goonies, only worse than both. The unknown young actors are completely out of their depth. The main protagonist is unbearably irritating, and the characters are nowhere near true: way too focused, determined and emotionally in touch to be believable. These performances hurt the found footage gimmick, which must feel natural in order to work. Not only is it not natural, the found footage rules are often broken, with strange edits and camera shots totally unexplained. It becomes more of a distraction than an effective tool. My father-in-law describes The Goonies, one of my favorites, as simply a bunch of kids running around and yelling. Maybe I'm getting old, but that's how I would describe E2E. It's the classic "adults just don't understand" story, but everything the kids do is so incredibly destructive I found myself siding with the antagonist adults! Kids will undoubtedly enjoy it, but it's just too familiar and unremarkable for me to get behind.
Review of Earth to Echo
