Earth to Echo (2014)

  I feel bad for this generation if this is the caliber of movie they are getting.  Let this be a lesson to you, Relativity Media:  just because you put in a cute robot does not mean you have a good movie.

Three boys, forced to move because of a highway expansion, use their last night together to investigate a strange signal on their phones.  It leads them miles from home to a mysterious piece of metal in a field.  They continue to follow the map, watching as the metal begins to repair itself, forming a small owl-like robot they name Echo.  Echo shows them the constellation it comes from and leads them to more pieces so it can rebuild its ship and go home.  But the kids are not the only ones looking for Echo.

Honestly, it's The Goonies + E.T. by way of hand-held cameras.  The leads are complete unknowns, which is fine except they seem just as unknown by the end credits.  I'm sure they all have great careers ahead of them but I doubt this movie is going to be the one that propels them to stardom.

There's no sense of character development, no real humor, and not really a sense of camaraderie.  I didn't care if these three boys made it.  I didn't even care if they were friends.  They could have been three perfect strangers who each got the signal on their phone and it might have been more interesting.  It would have made more sense, given how little they seemed to interact with one another.  Adding a girl in the last third felt like a lame attempt to avoid accusations of gender bias rather than an organic turn of the story.  The whole thing seemed very half-assed.