Aloha is about, um, it’s about. . .
Okay, let’s start with the basics: Brian Gilcrest (Bradley Cooper) is a contract worker for the military who has come for a brief stop in Hawaii to convince a group of native residents to trade their land. He is escorted around the island by a cute captain named Allison Ng (Emma Stone), who, despite being overbearing and rough around the edges, grows on him. Things get a little more complicated when Allison discovers Brian’s connection to a dubiously-intentioned businessman and an ex-girlfriend who is now unhappily married with children.
This new rom-com from Cameron Crowe, one of the most inoffensive filmmakers working today, stirred controversy among a group of native Hawaiians for not properly representing their culture. Although casting the pale, blonde Emma Stone as a character who is a quarter Hawaiian is a bit of a stretch, it is the very least of this film’s worries.
In his early work, like Jerry Maguire, Say Anything, and Almost Famous, Crowe was a master at creating one kind of “movie moment”: when the mundane is exaggerated to express heightened human emotions. Although these kinds of films aren’t grounded in circumstances we can identify with, they capture an essence of our everyday experiences by inflating them.
These movies provide this kind of unabashedly nice wish-fulfilment. In general, his films often feature great soundtracks with an eclectic taste of pop tunes that give us the warm and fuzzy feeling that something down-to-earth and ambiguous might miss.
Our lives don’t have a soundtrack by Peter Gabriel, but we can see ourselves wanting to be John Cusack holding that boombox over our head. It’s a little ridiculous and more than a little cheesy, but it gets at an aura, an emotion, a dream only the movies can give us.
Aloha has glimpses of these moments, but too often the film settles for another kind of “movie moment”: those absurd and contrived instances where we’re supposed to just go along with ridiculous coincidences, gaps in logic, and muddled motivation, because the characters do. Aloha seems totally oblivious to the fact that it too often indulges in this.
Much of this story is incomprehensible: why does the military need that specific piece of land where the group of Hawaiian natives are living? What is the military’s motive in privatizing satellites? Why did Brian Gilcrest get shot in Afghanistan? How does Brian take down the satellite at the end of the film?
Even the understandable plotting is flimsy with leaps of faith that are about as plausible as the Hawaiian myths in the film. For example, the film’s most crucial plot development — when Allison discovers that the satellite is secretly being weaponized — is contingent on at least seven assumptions: (1) that a pre-teen boy would bring a camcorder everywhere; (2) that he would sneak out to film random things at night; (3) that he would be able to stumble upon the location of the satellite; (4) that the workers arming the satellite would leave the doors to the factory open; (5) that he would be able to get past a fence and security (unless we are to believe there is no fence or security); (6) that he would be reviewing his footage on a television perfectly visible by Allison as she walks into the house unannounced; (7) that the boy wouldn’t tell his mother or Brian about the video.
Aloha has good intentions, but it feels like it’s from another planet.
