Aloha

Released:  May 29^th, 2015

Rated:  PG-13

Distributor:  Sony Pictures

Starring:  Bradley Cooper, Emma Stone, Rachel McAdams, Bill Murray, John Krasinski, Danny McBride, Alec Baldwin

Directed by:  Cameron Crowe

Written by:  Cameron Crowe

Personal Bias Alert:  huge Almost Famous fan, didn’t think Aloha could be as bad as people were saying

3 of 10

            There’s a certain fascination that overcomes you when watching this big of a train wreck.  It’s not so much a question of how it happened; movies are big, complicated beasts that can go wrong in more ways than you can count, but there is a sense of wonderment about how the film before you got released.  Someone, somewhere sat back after watching it, locked down the edit, and sent it out as a finished product to their bosses and to the world.  The shame and trepidation that must have enveloped them before hitting that send key had to be overwhelming, because no one can look at the final cut of Aloha and see a competent film.

            Competent, mind you, is a very low bar.  I’m talking about something that has a coherent plot and characters paired with an audio and visual presentation that isn’t off-putting.  That’s bare minimum of what a film should be, and Aloha manages to fail at three of these four things.  The first half is such chaos that it’s sort of stunning because you know the people in front of and behind the camera, can tell that they aren’t phoning it in, and it’s still a complete mess.  The film jumps around without any idea of where it’s going, the characters don’t have clear goals, the dialogue is, at times, nonsensical, the shot composition is occasionally ugly, and there’s jarring edits that interrupt any flow that the film manages to start.  The back half settles into something approaching coherence and gives you hints about what the film was supposed to be about, but irreparable damage has been done and you no longer care.

            What I think the film was supposed to be about is Brian Gilcrest’s (Bradley Cooper) struggle for morality.  As the opening narration explains, he once dreamed of going to space, but circumstances far from his control caused his aspirations to become mired in the dirty business of earning his spot.  After a failure and a long recovery, he returns to Hawaii for a chance to get his life back on some sort of track, and whether he chooses the right or wrong direction seems to be the film’s largest question.  Complicating matters is the love triangle between himself, a serious ex-girlfriend (Rachel McAdams), and his young, overly perky military liaison (Emma Stone).  Setting a story like this in Hawaii and steeping it in U.S. military and native Hawaiian culture is actually kind of genius as the relatively short battle between these two groups have gone down as one of the most corrupt and bullying engagements the U.S. has ever embarked upon (I recommend Sarah Vowell’s Unfamiliar Fishes for an entertaining history lesson).  If put together correctly, this could’ve been a rich film about a man and a country’s struggle to achieve noble aspirations in spite of their old, dishonorable habits.

            Unfortunately, Aloha doesn’t cobble this message together until late in the film, and even then it remains murky.  This is one of the films that got caught up in the Sony hacking incident late last year, with reports surfacing that the film was a mess and had to undergo extensive re-edits.  How bad it actually was to begin with isn’t currently known, but whatever edits they did make certainly didn’t improve it.  The final cut is so nonsensical that entire conversations have no meaning and have nothing to do with what happened in the scene before.  It’s as if they hired someone with brain damage, one of those unfortunate people who can’t remember things for more than 30 seconds, and paid them to edit the film.  Someone like that would probably like Aloha, because for all its shortcomings the cast is still likable and Hawaii is still beautiful.  On a moment to moment basis, the character’s arguments and motivations might make sense and the occasional horrendous shot could be quickly forgotten.  But most of us do have long-term memory, and Aloha is a film that will stay in there for all the wrong reasons.

Other Notes:

Ø  The opening credits roll over two entirely different setups.  One is a music montage over images of Hawaiian culture while the other is Bradley Cooper narrating his character’s background.  Neither go together and the transition between the two is abrupt.  It’s like they had two ideas for how to open the film and couldn’t decide which to go with, so they went halfsies in such a way that everyone lost instead of won.

Ø  The romance doesn’t work.  I have no clue if that’s due to the awful edit or a lack of chemistry.  Your guess is as good as mine.

Ø  I don’t think this film is guilty of whitewashing Hawaiian culture, but Emma Stone’s character is certainly whitewashed.  I still love Emma Stone, though.