Echoes of War

...and unfortunately, this is one of them. Where does one even begin with this debacle?

Let's start with the dialogue: OMG, people during the Civil War era didn't speak like the way the writers of this have written the characters. That immediately erased any suspension of disbelief.

Next, the performances weren't terrible, but they weren't great either. A really deft cast might have been able to improvise the poorly written dialogue to elevate the film and their performances, but instead we are left with characters sounding almost like the way people in today's society would speak.

Cinematography was okay for the most part but became a bit self-indulgent for the worse at a few points.

The movie crawls along and is sabotaged by it's sluggish pacing. This film could have easily been a 60-70 minute film instead of a drawn-out 100 minute yawner.

The overall story suffers from a complete lack of originality and consequently fails to really draw in the viewer. There are a few scenes that work, but the majority of them in this film are pointless and somewhat incoherent.

If you value your time, you might want to avoid this one.

I challenge anyone to sit and watch this movie in its entirety. The writers of this material must have been really really high when writing this. And the people who funded this must have been even higher. The people behind this couldn't have made this any more boring if they had tried. Stupidity begets stupidity.

Sitting through the entirety of Echoes of War was a difficult task, to say the least. I guess I was expecting something else, something totally different, something entertaining. It reminded me of sitting through one of those educational films in high school history or science class. You want to watch it because you're hoping to learn something (in this case be drawn in by a compelling story), but you end up with heavy eyelids and your mind drifting off thinking about whether you want a Big Mac or a Whopper when the bell rings or final credits come up.

If I'm going to be expected to sit through a slow burn drama like this, it damn well better be captivating with staggering performances. Echoes of War had neither. I think James Badge Dale and William Forseythe are decent actors and did a fair job considering what they had to work with, but the material was simply too sub-par to expect anything more from them. The characters are one-dimensional and predictable. Difficult to tell if you can fault the direction on this or not. Sometimes even when you have a great director at the helm of a slow, deliberate drama, it can still fall flat and fail to move an audience.

The other problem I had with this film was the score became slightly distracting at times. I gave this a rating of 3 only because I'm a fan of the Western genre, but if you're forced to watch this thing, I suggest you suck down 10 cups of coffee beforehand.

Well, I just wonder if you ever watched NBC's singing contest program, "The Voice". Did you ever feel that you were going crazy when you listened to one of the coaches, Adam Levine? He usually got nothing to say, but that did not stop him to blah, blah and blah, blabbering with lot of hollow words, beating about the bush endlessly, like he was trapped in his own hollow words and didn't know how to stop and get out of it. Why a guy with nothing to say but still tried so hard to say something that he did not know what he was saying or talking about? So every time when its his turn to say something but couldn't find the exact words or thoughts he's trying to say but did not realize he just tried to talk about something out of nothing, at that time, you lost your temper and patience, jumped up from the sofa, yelled and screamed at the image of Adam Levin on the screen: "SHUT UP! JUST SHUT UP!"

Did you ever attend a college class with a lousy professor who mysteriously got the tenure to teach the students who tried to learn something but only got clueless garbled rubbish from him?

Did you ever tried to listen to some of the idiotic politicians to deliver a hollow speech in front of the voters?

This film is exactly like what I have to point out as the above-mentioned.

There was actually nothing to say, the storyline was just a very thin and short straight line; you could actually put all the words in half page. The whole movie is like it could be told all in the short synopsis out of a very very short story, but miraculously turned out to be a 600 pages big novel.

The whole movie was snail-crawling from the very beginning to the end without almost nothing to tell, so a scene of shaving head or cutting, chopping wood, walking through the forest, or woke up from nightmares, praying, press flowers between book pages, eating, skinning animals....all in close-up like slow motion crap. We also saw a camera usually followed behind the actors without any special purpose, the shaky scenes usually prolonged quite a while for nothing to tell specially.

This pathetic movie, I think, was actually written and directed by Adam Levine.

Screenwriters John Chriss and Kane Senes have provided a screenplay filled with way too many western cliché's and not enough original content. Re Senes' direction, the sluggish pace causes this film to spiral out of control. The acting in the film is also weak. James Badge Dale is very one dimensional in his role as the war veteran. William Forsythe's character is also a lost cause: acting as the antagonist in the film, you neither understand, nor do you care about the events of his past that have lead to the person he is now. Echoes of War is a film that struggles to resonate any true enjoyment for its viewers. A story that is not original and is in fact quite boring, it is destined to ride off into the sunset and out of our memories very quickly. Don't waste one second of your time on this film. You can thank me later!