About the nicest thing I can say about this film is that it wasn't boring...for the most part. It is an obvious homage to 1980s "kids go on adventure" films like "E.T." While I have nothing against those types of films, they've never been my favorites, failing to capture my imagination like they did with many others. This, perhaps, makes me not the ideal audience for "Earth to Echo". Films that seek to pay homage to other films often (though not always) pale by comparison. If I'm not a fan of those other films in the first place, odds are against me enjoying the homage.
The film's fatal flaw is that each of the main characters is more of a "type" than an actual character. While this may be fine for the intended audience of children whose tastes may be less discerning, I found it to be a major problem. While the child actors themselves weren't terrible, their roles were so underwritten that I found it difficult to find the characters likeable or care very much about what happened to them. This made all of the manufactured "emotional" moments in the film feel artificial and annoying.
There was nothing original about the film. The ending especially was drawn out too long (and was where things started to get boring). If there's any doubt about what will ultimately happen in a film, it is much easier to be invested in the events that precede it. When you basically know how everything is going to end, the scenes leading up to that ending (whether they be action scenes or dialogue driven) start to drag, and you just want them to get to the end already. I found myself thinking during this film that there was one way it could be salvaged: if, in the end, the cute little alien the kids had been spending the film trying to help turned out to be evil and completely destroyed their town and everyone in it. That would have been awesome. Of course, I knew this would never happen, and the film proceeded down its listless, predictable road to the end.
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