Earth To Echo
Director: Dave Green
Actors: Astro, Reese Hartwig, Teo Halm
Release Date: Saturday 30th November 2013
Genre(s): Adventure
Running time: 91 minutes
Adults of a certain age will look disappointingly upon the cinema releases aimed at children of a certain age, and sigh wistfully about how they 'don't make them like they used to.' Well, Earth To Echo is exactly the kind of film those adults are talking about, reminiscent of the likes of Batteries Not Included or Flight Of The Navigator, if those movies were sponsored by GoPro sports cameras.
Three best friends – Alex (adopted, abandonment issues), Tuck (fast talker, all bark) and Munch (overweight nerd, finds mannequins attractive, possible future serial killer) – are about to be displaced by the government to make room for a new superhighway, but then their phones start acting weird and they find out that it’s all a cover-up for a crash-landed alien. When they discover the cute little metallic ET, which they call Echo, they help him source the parts he needs to get his spaceship working again, so he can go home before the government agents find them.
If the kids from Super 8 took some film-making tips from the kids from Chronicle, Earth To Echo is what you'd be left with. The hand-held footage is even more dizzying than usual this time, with the cameras mounted to bike frames as the kids adventure their way around their town, so anyone who found the likes of Cloverfield or Blair Witch vomit-inducing are going to be pushed to their limits here.
It's refreshing for a kids film to be completely sans any kind of recognisable faces – the biggest star is Tuck, played by Astro, an American X-Factor runner-up – and the kids do some decent, if cliched work. Same goes for the rest of the movie, with a first time feature director and screenwriter behind the camera, neither testing the waters of ingenuity, but still delivering solid, enjoyable work.
Entertaining and undemanding, this is a perfectly acceptable way to distract the kids for an hour and a half.
