Cameron Crowe's Aloha (2015): Hollywood and American Militourism in the Pacific

Abstract

abstract:When Aloha was released in 2015 critics attacked the film for having a muddled plot involving the Hawaiian independence movement, traditional Hawaiian culture and religion, ethnicity, and the greed of the American military industrial complex. Partially using the evidence from the 2014 email hack of Sony Studios, I will examine Hollywood's and Sony's cinematic representations of Hawai'i that have been so fashioned by U.S. imperialism in the Pacific and tourism leading to the phenomenon of militourism. All of this produces in Aloha a conflicted, utopian, faux-ecological, white tourist/military version of Hawai'i that ignores the realities of the massive presence of the American military industrial complex throughout the Pacific area.