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| Directed and Written by Cameron Crowe |
One of the hardest parts of this gig is when something just isn't quite right. Transcendently terrific true art? That's easy to write about, the hard part is coming down from the contact high and looking for things that you can actually criticize. Mystifying, blaze-of-imagined glory, cinematic disaster-pieces? Those can be fun in a cathartic sort of way. But notably imperfect is not easy. Aloha is that kind of movie, the kind where there are a lot of parts that you like, and that you want to focus on, but it doesn't work in some nagging specific way that just won't let you ignore it. It's like a loose thread in the world's most luxurious coat, it ruins the whole thing and leaves you awkwardly itching for the entire day.
Bradley Cooper is a defense contractor for the Air Force sent to Hawaii to negotiate with a local nationalist group to set up a launch platform for a satellite owned by Bill Murray as an Elon Musk type billionaire looking to restart America's space program with some good old fashioned entrepreneurship. Along the way he reconnects with Rachel McAdams as his ex-wife - or old flame, it isn't entirely clear - and falls in love with Emma Stone as a local Air Force officer assigned to work with him on negotiations with the locals.
Although it isn't the primary focus of the plot, on a thematic level Aloha, like Interstellar and Tomorrowland is another movie about how we need to restart manned space travel if we want to remain a great power. Unlike those two however, it explicitly argues not only against militarizing space, but also against private sector involvement. The lynchpin of the Hawaiians' argument against allowing the launchpad is that it would involve moving the graves of their ancestors to make way for a wealthy Western businessman to make millions by launching weapons into the sky, which they hold sacred.
Unfortunately, again like Interstellar and Tomorrowland, Aloha has almost no subtlety or grace in how it conveys that message. Characters make exclamations like "You can't buy the sky" and "If we can't look up there with purity and purpose we're finished!" I get the sentiment, I'm all for pumping federal money into space travel, and I don't quite trust private entities motivated by profit to make mankind's message to the stars, but between these three movies, I also think NASA desperately needs better advocates.
There are some things I did like about Aloha, but mostly on a conceptual level and they fail in practice. Bill Murray and Bradley Cooper are great, but they feel like they're each playing a character written for the other, I could totally see Murray playing a down on his luck old pro Army guy and Cooper (still rocking that American Sniper body) playing a young hot shot executive convinced he can bring back American greatness by just throwing enough money at it. It's impressive that Crowe is willing to give the native nationalists and actual voice, and legitimate concerns that could get audiences thinking about issues of ethnic pride and colonial legacy and conflicting nationalisms, and all sorts of other stuff that you usually don't see explored in mainstream family movies... until they fade into the background for the entire rest of the movie.
I'm just going to say it, in 2015 there is no excuse for setting a film in Hawaii, arguably the most diverse cultural melting pot in the world, and still having the main cast be entirely white. The closest it comes to one of the main cast actually being Hawaiian is claiming that Emma Stone's character is 1/4 native on her mother's side. Then again, Emma Stone is great in this, it's like she's acting in an entirely different movie, one that I want to see since Aloha, with its ham handed message mongering, conflicted tone, and sad case of Return of the King's Endless Endings Syndrome, fizzles out like a rocket misfiring on the launchpad.
Have a nice day.
Greg.B
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