Aloha

In every really bad movie, there's usually one defining moment where it suddenly hits you that you're watching a really bad movie. That moment in Aloha comes in the first minute. Based on the reviews, I knew there was a very good chance that it was going to be a disappointment. I just didn't think the disappointment would come quite so fast.

The fact that it's a bad film is unfortunate on a couple of levels.

First, it's a Cameron Crowe film. When your resume includes Say Anything, Jerry McGuire and Almost Famous, you're allowed the occasional misstep (which he already had with Elizabethtown and, to a lesser degree, Vanilla Sky), but you're not supposed to stumble this badly. The closest analogue to this situation is M. Night Shyamalan, who was doing just fine through The Village, bombed horribly with Lady in the Water, and crossed the Rubicon with The Happening. Aloha isn't Lady in the Water-bad, but like that film came to define Shyamalan, to use a line that was in Aloha's trailer but was cut out of the film, Crowe is going to wear it like Flava Flav wears a clock.

Speaking of the trailer, that's the second thing that felt like a letdown. I really liked the trailer. Was it corny? A bit. But it hit all the right buttons for me. Characters saying inspiring, Crowe-ish dialogue, Bill Murray doing Bill Murray things, and a fantastic song, "First" by Cold War Kids.

As it turns out, the trailer is something of a misrepresentation of the actual product. It's implied that the first scene in it is what sets off Brian's exile to Hawaii. That scene is actually towards the very end of the film. In the full context of the film, the snippets of dialogue don't work nearly as well. Bill Murray's character isn't as warm and cuddly as he appears to be. And so on. I guess trailers don't need to be 100% accurate, but nor should they attempt to portray an entirely different story.

So in general, it's safe to say that Aloha isn't a good film. But there were several specific things that really drove me nuts. Things that were not just bad, but actually insulting to my intelligence as a moviegoer. And bear in mind, just a few weeks ago, I watched a film where Vin Diesel drove a car through a skyscraper. So I don't think I'm being overly-picky here.

I could probably come up with a top ten list, but in the interest of time, I'll stick with the five worst parts of Aloha:

1) It's been 13 years since Brian and Tracy last saw each other. Tracy's and Woody's daughter, Grace, is 12 years old. Anyone who's seen any movie ever immediately realizes what that means, and to the film's credit, when Tracy tells Brian that Grace is his daughter, it's not presented as a big dramatic reveal.

But how stupid does that make Woody? Did he and Tracy start dating literally the moment after she and Brian broke up? Because otherwise, she would've been several weeks pregnant when they began seeing each other. It's later revealed that Woody does indeed know that Grace is Brian's, but it's unclear if he's always known or realized it when he saw the two of them together. Tracy certainly seemed to be under the impression that he's completely oblivious.

2) Other than the demands of the plot, why was Allison assigned to Brian as a liaison in the first place? He seems to know as much, if not more, about Hawaiian culture than she does. And in an amazing coincidence, he's even close friends with the Hawaiian king who he needs to negotiate with. So she never gets around to doing all that much liaising.

One of the critics' biggest knocks on the film is that Emma Stone was cast as someone who's a quarter Hawaiian and a quarter Chinese. This is actually one of the few things about Aloha that didn't bug me, if for no other reason than that Emma Stone is the one consistently bright spot in the whole film. But from a plot perspective, wouldn't it have made more sense to assign Brian an administrator who's 100% Hawaiian instead of a fighter pilot?

But here's what I really don't get: Why is Allison staying in the hotel room right next to Brian's? She lives there. In Hawaii. She works on that base. Doesn't she have her own apartment?

3) Brian's mission is to negotiate with the sovereign Hawaiian people for a public blessing so that Bill Murray's company can build something or other on sacred ground. After some back and forth with the king, where Brian seems offended by the idea that a military contractor might attempt to do something evil like put weapons into outer space, he brokers a deal where he gets the blessing in exchange for the Hawaiians receiving two mountains and free cell phone service. Who owns the mountains Brian gives away? Which private company will be forced to provide free cell phone service, presumably for life? It doesn't matter. Brian just single-handedly makes the deal. You'd think a military liaison would be like, "Whoa, hey, let's slow down," but Allison seems down with the plan, too.

Did they really need to fly in Brian for this? Because it seems like it could have been taken care of with a phone call. That or, once again, you would think there would be someone already in Hawaii who could handle this.

4) It turns out that Brian isn't just a smooth-talking military contractor who can charm Hawaiian kings. He's also a master hacker. Like, the film just springs this on us out of nowhere in the last fifteen minutes.

As Bill Murray's satellite is shooting up into space, they discover that the Chinese have hacked it. Remember when Brian told the Hawaiian king that the satellite his company is launching doesn't have any weapons on it? IT TOTALLY DOES. But no big deal. Brian says he can undo the Chinese hack while the rocket is launching.

Even if the satellite didn't have a giant laser or nukes or whatever on board (I don't think we ever really find out what sort of weapon was involved), this seems like a grossly irresponsible thing to do. There's no reason given why the launch can't be cancelled. But luckily, Brian is able to undo the hack. We know this because a bunch of red text on his monitor turns green and the control room breaks out into relieved applause, as control rooms in movies do.

5) But all that is just set up for the big climax. Just when you thought the movie had run out of old friends for Brian to run into on Hawaii, there's one more. Some slovenly guy with a beard who works alone in an observatory, who's clearly also some sort of hacker. You can tell because he's a slovenly guy with a beard who works alone in an observatory.

Again, Brian hasn't been back to Hawaii in 13 years. Imagine if someone, even someone who was a really, really close friend once, who you hadn't seen in 13 years, asked you for a favor. Would you do it? What if that favor was helping him blow up a billion dollar military satellite, where the penalty would almost certainly be spending the rest of your life in federal prison? It takes Brian roughly ten seconds to talk his buddy into completely throwing his life away, and before you know it, Brian is telling him to--and I wish I was making this up--pump "every sound in recorded history" up to the satellite. I know you can do a lot of shit with computers nowadays, but I'm pretty sure you still can't do that.

But it works. The satellite blows up. From sound. But instead of being dragged off to Guantanamo Bay with his friend, Brian is allowed to leave under his own free will. Alec Baldwin yells at him and Bill Murray makes ominous threats, but you never really get the sense that Brian just committed an act of domestic terrorism, which he totally did.

None of that matters, though! Because the government finds out that Bill Murray actually did have weapons on board that satellite. Everyone seems mostly amused by the whole thing, as if a billionaire industrialist sending weapons into space, presumably to be used for evil, isn't really that big of a deal. At least when James Bond stops someone like that, at the end of the film, everyone at MI6 appears to be greatly relieved.

The scene where Bill Murray gets arrested, alone, on the beach, looking up the sky and I guess contemplating how close he came to ruling the world, before being dragged away by the FBI, sums up the entire Aloha experience: It looks nice, but makes no sense whatsoever.

But here's the thing: In spite of all the stupid shit I just described, and lots more stupid shit that I didn't...I did in fact kind of enjoy Aloha.

I always hate it when film geeks attempt to deflect criticism of a movie they like by claiming that the people who don't share their opinion simply "don't get" what the director was attempting. So I won't do that here. But at the same time, I do have this feeling that Crowe was attempting something. I can't define it, and he clearly failed miserably at it. But there's just enough of it sprinkled throughout the film that I appreciated it on some level.

Or maybe I'm just trying to rationalize liking a bad movie. It's been known to happen.