What do you get when you have Bradley Cooper, Emma Stone, Rachel McAdams, Bill Murray, John Krasinski, Danny McBride, and Alec Baldwin in one movie? Awesome right? It might as well be.
Now Aloha is a movie written and directed by Cameron Crowe, the guy who also wrote Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Jerry Maguire, and Almost Famous. He was also the who one who created the screenplays of Vanilla Sky and We Bought a Zoo. So clearly the movie will be something short of great when you have taken these films altogether.
The movie is about a military contractor named Brian Gilcrest (played by Bradley Cooper) who was sent back to Hawaii to help in the expansion of a military base there. The expansion was for a defense contractor Carson Welch (played by Bill Murray) who plans to build a space center for the military. In Brian's return, he was paired with an Air Force liaison in Captain Allison Ng (played by Emma Stone) and he met his former sweetheart in Tracy (played by Rachel McAdams).
Brian's mission is to appease the Hawaiian King, King Kanahele and get his blessing for the planned expansion project. For a time there he was having some problems until Allison stepped in and interceded for him. Allison being partial Hawaiian made the connection with the King and was instrumental in making his mission a success. And a few scenes later they had sex.
Allison Ng is very idealistic when it comes to dealing with the sky above. She believes in the Hawaiian gods won't be happy if we weaponize it. This was her view when she helped out Brian with King Kanahele, who also would not want a weapon on the supposed project expansion. All were fine until Allison found out that Carson had other plans. She had a fight with Brian about this but his hands were tied, he had to help Carson.
In the end, he was able to help Carson launch the weaponized satellite but Brian had a change of heart because of Allison. Brian mentions that his career was dead and pushed Allison away to keep her from being implicated. Of course eventually Brian's actions were exonerated and he was able to be with Allison in the end.
I might have skipped some loving moments in between but these were I think was good to make another movie altogether.
Now, the movie in itself is a refreshingly new approach. An original story with clearly written scenes with witty dialogues, I love it if taken on these parameters. However cleverly written, the movie suffers on continuity or maybe I don't know how its called. Let me explain.
The movie suffers from too many well written scenes even when these are side stories. Very creative, very rich in content but somehow distracted this writer as to what the real story was here. Was this movie about Brian and Tracy? Tracy and Woody? Brian and Allison? Brian and King Kanahele? Brian and Carson? There were a lot of side stories that all were complete, so complete.
In the end, for us it was all about Brian. It wasn't the space program, it wasn't his relationships with the women but it was about simply Brian. After watching the movie in its entirety that we were able to surmise his apprehension about his love life and career and his history.
It's easy to be deluged by the dialogues but for this writer, what was not said was the most endearing of them all. There was a scene when the silent Woody confronted Brian about Tracy. With no words spoken, the two was able to reach out (there were subtitles as dialogues) and messages was sent and received, albeit correctly. Such a cute scene of "brotherly" love.
If you like to watch this, you may as its being shown on Netflix.
