Based on the people involved, the writer and director Cameron Crowe. The actors, Bradley Cooper, Rachel McAdams, Bill Murray, Alec Baldwin, Emma Stone I was expecting a great movie and this movie fell way short of even being a good movie.

As a screenwriter, you learn about “On the nose dialog” and using what is called “subtext” instead which is a way of writing dialog the way people really talk in real life. Well, in a movie you can way overuse this subtext idea to the point where you have no idea what people are saying or what is going on, or why. This is the case with Aloha. In many parts of the story, you really have no idea what is going on, or what people were referring to, mainly because of the overuse of subtext. There was one point in the movie where the Bradley Cooper character explained to Rachel McAdams that her husband was saying things to him, just by using his eyes and his posture and his menacing physique. This was referred to again at the end of the movie where McAdam’s husband and Cooper had a conversation with each other and they said absolutely nothing to each other. They just hugged, and looked into each others eyes and the movie explained what they were saying by using subtitles. It was one of the stupidest moments I have ever seen in a movie. Nobody in the audience laughed and the moment didn’t work the first time so to do this even in a much more dramatic way a second time was absurd.

Its very obvious that Cameron Crowe has a great deal of clout in Hollywood, which is why when he writes a bad script all these great and famous people show up to make his movie. Just because a person has written a great screenplay in the past, does not mean that they will all be good by default. This movie was boring and you just didn’t care enough or understand enough about the plot to want to sit there for 2 hours and try and understand why this movie was even made.

I do not recommend this movie.

Writing Subtext

Quite simply, the special effects are unbelievable in this movie. You just have to admire the realism and the accuracy of buildings collapsing, a tsunami, the Hoover Damn being destroyed by an earthquake. The computer generated effects actually make you believe that you are actually there in the worst disaster in world or American History. God forbid something like this ever happens in this country because the economic damage to this country would be beyond repair and the loss of life would be staggering.

As far as the story for this movie, there really isn’t one, but that is not the point of a movie like this. This movie is about special effects and I recommend this movie based on the special effects only.

Special Effects in Movies

The first thing I had to do before I saw this movie was look up the meaning of the word “Madding”, which I was not familiar with. The definition of this word is “In a state of frenzy or frenzied”. After seeing this 2 hour movie I didn’t fully realize the correlation between this word and the story, but when you consider that this movie has to do with a woman going through the trials and tribulations of 3 relationships, I guess you can say that something like this can be considered frenzied.

The acting in this movie was good and so was the countryside and the visuals of old English Farm country and mansions. This movie will remind you of movies from the 30’s or 40’s and even though the story line is something we have all seen before, overall because of the ending, the story and the acting, I do recommend this movie.

Screenwriting mistakes