Echoes of War

Nothing happens in this. Seriously...nothing! If you're going to rehash the tired Hatfield and McCoy-type saga, either make it bold and fresh, or go figure out something else to do. To call this boring and pedestrian is an understatement. I would have rather been coughed on by strangers with COVID19 than to kill a half hour on this.

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.

This was torture to sit through. To call this piece tedious and boring is an understatement.

The plot is basically about a Civil War vet returning home to his family and becoming involved in a feud with their neighbors. There is nothing compelling to drive the story forward, there are long scenes of characters doing mundane things and not too much happens in this. I wonder what was the point of making it. Is it supposed to be experimental? I don't get it. The performances from the actors were, in my opinion, quite subpar. William Forseythe did what he could I suppose, but you can't build a house without a foundation, and this script's foundation was never laid. I'll assume it's lazy writing, what else could it be? Also, the accents of the actors were way off, not even remotely realistic.

I regret spending time watching it.

I picked up this movie really cheap ($1.25) from a dollar store in my neighbourhood, since I quite often like to look at obscure movies since there are some real gems hidden out there. However, it didn't take long into watching it to determine that this was one movie that deserves to be unknown. Now, unlike some of the other user commenters here, I didn't find the acting to be particularly bad - nothing exceptional, but it was acceptable. And for what had to be a REALLY low budget, the filmmakers managed to stretch out every penny that they had (though I will admit that the movie isn't exactly lavish). But there is one big problem with the movie that sinks it, and that it is *painfully* slow and almost totally uneventful. Scene after scene goes by where *nothing* of real significance happens. You have to wait until 85% of the movie has gone by before things start really cooking, and then it's dealt with in just a manner of minutes. In the end, the movie seems to have no point at all, unless it was to be a nice tax write-off for the investors.

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.