“Earth to Echo” is such a shameless “E.T.” rip-off that I picture excited dictionary editors rushing to their publishing plants screaming, “Stop the presses! All previous examples we’ve given of rip-off and shameless have just become obsolete!”
Three adolescent boys (Brian “Astro” Bradley, Teo Halm and Reese Hartwig) living in a suburb that’s about to be razed to make room for a superhighway trace weird signals from their cellphones to a power-line tower in the desert. There they discover a coffee-can sized metal alien with adorable blue eyes. The thing looks like a cross between a kitten and a cockroach.
Calling the lil’ fella Echo, the boys (and a random young lady they pick up along the way because the screenwriter remembered halfway through that you’re supposed to sell tickets to girls) establish that the critter, who blinks once for yes and twice for no, wants to get onboard his spaceship and go home.
So did I. The big (by which I mean small) innovation here is that this time everything’s juiced up with smartphones, tiny camcorders and other gizmos (E.T., phone Cupertino) and the film is meant to look like an assemblage of amateur documentary footage (hold the line Mr. Terrestrial, I’ve got Blair Witch on Line Two).
To kid audiences, or so goes the hope, all of this will come across as raw YouTube-y reality, but the found-footage fad is so tired — a child conceived at a Blair Witch drive-in screening would be older than these characters — that these days the technique is just an extra, annoying level of artifice atop all the other fakery that goes into a movie.
The characters are thin, the plot predictable: Bad guys in orange construction vests want to capture the alien and test it to death, while the good kids just want to sneak off with Echo and watch him zoom away to a better galaxy. (Also, the chief villain looks like the son of the lead tool from “Ghostbusters,” William Atherton).
There’s so little to hold your attention (except for a couple of cool scenes when Echo uses his telekinetic powers to rearrange all the metal around him, Magneto-style) that all you notice is the surface: the overcaffeinated cutting, the strenuously poor framing, the playing with the zoom lens and the labored attempts to be scary by making the images disintegrate into digital pixels.
Even at a cramped and frenetic 82 minutes, the movie feels long. That’s what happens when the audience can guess everything that’s going to happen in advance. Even the 12-year-olds the movie is aimed at weren’t born yesterday.