Aloft (2015)

I am a serious and intelligent movie watcher of more than 55 years. I look for movies that attempt to say something when selecting an indie. After watching any movie, if it stays on my mind for days or weeks, I count it as a worthwhile film to have watched. Aloft has been on mind for weeks since viewing it.I suspect that those of us with moderately wretched lives due to personal and family tragedy are prone to be more affected by the effort. You know, those of us who still do not have all of the answers to life even after 60+ years on this rock and years of formal philosophical and literary education.I recommend that if anything in the trailer, reviews or other sources about the movie appeals to you at all, you should watch the movie with an open mind and make your own decision about its "worth".Connolly and Laurent (sp?) were compelling.

The acting is fine, Jennifer Connelly is always good as is Cillian Murphy and the kid-actors were fine as well.Visually it's also a nice looking movie, with limited colours that creates and cold and melancholic feeling which suits the movie just fine, because it is rather melancholic.The movie though is just good enough not to be bad, but far from great.Needless to say Jennifer Connelly's character is very spiritual and believes in healing, I believe her character is supposed to be Native American although I am not quite sure about this but a lot of her spiritual beliefs stem from them if nothing else.So it helps if you have some sort of interest in that or at least an open mind because it's not always very up front and direct in it's approach to tell the story with plenty of metaphors and subtlety more so than direct big orchestrated dramatic scenes.The blu-ray version (at least the one I watched could possibly differ in some countries) is 97 minutes, and not 112 minutes like it says on IMDb.From what I've heard the version shown on festivals was indeed 112 minutes but it wasn't received that well so they cut it down to 97 minutes for the blu-ray/DVD market.And although that caught me off guard initially, I'm not quite sure if it would be able to sustain my interest for 112 minutes so this could be one of those times where the cut down version is actually better, although I of course can't be sure about this.

I know that Jennifer likes to do unusual movies but this one is her worst choice ever ! My Five First Minutes rule has been right : here, you understand nothing, the place, the characters and you are greatly annoyed by this spoiled brat with the falcon ! So the entire movie is like this : scenes drags painfully to say little, nothing is explained or makes sense, the characters are empty or boring, those cold winter locations are everything but poetic (prefer « Fargo »), Murphy brings his usual lack of charisma, the editing is salvaged by stupid flashbacks, proof that this writer/director can't tell a story ! For one movie that was about hope in distress, my watching was very painful, so much i have to fast forward it with absolutely no surprises, no emotion ! Just awful !

"Aloft" is a film from last year written and directed by Claudia Llosa. It was her 3rd full feature film, but first long movie in 5 years after the Oscar-nominated "Milk of Sorrow". It was also her first work with big names from Hollywood such as Oscar winner Jennifer Connelly, Cilian Murphy and Mélanie Laurent. The information on the IMDb page says that this one here runs for over 110 minutes, but the version I saw went roughly 20 minutes shorter.This film play during two different times. The first would be when Murphy's character is still a little boy and we see how he gets disconnected with his mother, the second playing decades later when Murphy's character meets her again and also meets his love interest played by Laurent. I personally found that this film went mostly for emotion without elaborating convincingly on the characters. The apparently terminal illness of Laurent's character, the falcon shooting, the other boy's actually terminal illness etc. It felt like this film wanted to get the audience to cry at all costs, but forget to deliver in terms of storytelling unfortunately. This is also why overall I cannot really recommend this movie. Quite a shame as the actors are certainly talented.