Chopper and Echo

Cute sentient robots from "Star Wars Rebels" and "Earth to Echo" meet cute.

"Earth to Echo" was recently released to DVD and on demand, so Ansel insisted that we had to watch it again. 

Very reminiscent of "E.T.," the movie combines two of Ansel's favorite things, an insipidly cute alien, and kids acting on their own, completely free of adult supervision. 

Three boys discover "Echo" out in the scrub and spend an entire night helping the little extraterrestrial find the parts he needs to repair himself and reassemble his spaceship. They lie to their rather oblivious parents, ride their bicycles on highways in the dark, break into various commercial and residential locations to help Echo find parts, and tangle with a potentially evil adult wearing an orange safety vest who seems to know something about what is going on. As the kids and alien finally triumph in the morning and a huge spaceship assembles itself in the sky over their suburban subdivision, one of the kids exclaims proudly, "We did this!" 

Aside from the distractingly jittery hand-held camera work- supposedly one of the kids is shooting the night's events on video- "Earth to Echo" is a fairly entertaining, kid friendly story. I was able to sit through it two times without too much discomfort.

Given my role as the mother of two boys who would love to have a darling alien provide them with an excuse for subterfuge and misdemeanors, however, I view the ending with a somewhat jaundiced eye.  I have to wonder if after making his kid-enabled escape, Echo might be able to return with a fleet of space ships carrying alien overlords bent on enslaving the human race, or sucking all the salt out of the earth's oceans, or blowing up our solar system to make way for an intergalactic highway...