Watch The First 8 Minutes Of Cameron Crowe's 'Aloha'

Director Cameron Crowe returns to theaters this weekend with Aloha, starring Bradley Cooper, Emma Stone, and Rachel McAdams. The film looks like a pretty routine romantic comedy thanks to trailers, but in fact there's more to it than that. The first eight minutes of the film are now online, and the credits sequence introduces a melange of concepts, from the integration of Hawaii to the United States, to the rise and fall of the US space program.

Watch the Aloha opening below, featuring that credits sequence and the first big sequence establishing several of the film's primary characters.

Here's the Aloha opening, via MovieFone.

As we present this, the first reviews of Aloha have hit, and they're not good. Peter said earlier today,

There are some ideas in Aloha which could have been great if explored on their own. There are magical moments between characters, the ones you come to expect from a Cameron Crowe film, set to music carefully and beautifully curated by the filmmaker. I enjoyed these moments, and I enjoyed some of the ideas that I think Crowe was trying to explore, but the film as a whole doesn't work.

And that's one of the more positive takes. "Well-intentioned" seems to be the best thing anyone has to say, with many reviews complaining of the film being an overstuffed, awkward combination of story ideas. And while a straight-up list of some of the other ideas in the film actually piques my curiosity, I don't know how they'll all come together.

Indeed, that problem seems apparent even in the opening. Dense as it may be, this is also a collection of elements that seems to collide more than complement one another. And that's not even getting into the question of how Aloha seems to use Hawaii's native residents as nothing more than exotic color.