To reiterate the spoilers flag, this review DEFINITELY contains spoilers and lots of them. Watch out.
For the most part, the plot of AURORA seems to be that of a "regulation" ghost story. An oceangoing ship, heavily laden with passengers, is passing by a Philippine island. On board is the corpse of a man who had suffered from giantism. For some reason, the ghost of this giant is grimly determined never to return home, which is apparently where the ship is heading, and so takes possession of the captain of the ship and causes the ship to pile up on the rocks just off shore of the Philippine island. Where the ship comes to rest, coincidentally, is also directly in front of a waterfront inn run by a local Philippine woman.
Many people are killed in the resulting wreck. Making the situation even worse is the fact that the ship was overloaded with many illicit passengers who were stowed in inappropriate places such as the cargo hold. Greed by the ships owners, operators and officers and many other government officials was the cause of the presence of so many illicit passengers; anyone who could pay was given passage regardless of the implications for the general safety.
The traditional ghost story cause for ghosts "happening" is that a living person experiences some sort of wrongful death and a ghost is the unsettled spirit that results. In this particular story, the wrongful death of so many exploited passengers leads to a giant surfeit of ghosts. You can't sneeze without knocking some down.
Most of the movie relates the experiences of the owner/operator of the waterfront inn trying to cope with the excessive number of ghosts leading, of course, to the public exposure of the widespread corruption/wrongdoing that led to so many unnecessary deaths so that the ghosts can be at peace and the families of the ghosts can achieve closure.
The end.
Ultimately, for any ghost story, there is almost always a single story aspect that determines whether or not the ghost story is going to be any good, and this aspect takes a bit of explanation. Prepare for a digression.
For most fiction stories, the "nature of reality" forms the rocksolid, immutable foundation upon which the story can be built. Generally speaking "everybody" understands reality inasmuch as they are forced to live with it every day of their lives. The laws of physics apply to everyone equally and as humans we've evolved to, more or less, understand the nature of reality intrinsically. Conveniently, evolution expediently takes care of anyone who doesn't get reality, and this leaves the rest of us all pretty much on the same page as far as the nature of reality is concerned.
Because of this, people writing fiction stories and their audiences know the entire collection of rules they have to follow and what to expect, respectively. Everybody arrives to the story with the rules already established. For example, an author of Western stories is always aware that they DON'T have the poetic license to suddenly start making horses fly, and the readers of those Western stories don't have to worry about abruptly and irritatingly encountering such nonsense and trying to figure out what it means.
In short, a common understanding of reality between creators and consumers of fiction constitutes the universal, firm scaffolding upon which upon which fiction stories may be created and enjoyed without confusion or argument.
Uniquely, stories of the supernatural, and particularly ghost stories, are peculiar in that they must function WITHOUT benefit of this common understanding of reality. Wild departures from reality, after all, is the very core of what a ghost story IS. To make an analogy, writing a coherent ghost story is somewhat like trying to play a legitimate game of baseball with no rules. Writing a decent story in the context of no common understanding of reality between storyteller and audience borders on the impossible. How do you coherently address the issue of what can and cannot happen within the story (what are the limitations and rules that must be followed). The answer is that somehow, and this is very difficult to do, a ghost story has to not only tell it's story, but it must also make clear the rules it is following. Or, put another way, which particular rules of reality it's breaking in order to tell its story.
Every ghost story teeters perpetually on the edge of random balderdash that pushes audiences past what they're willing to accept, and often this results in audiences reflexively rejecting ghost stories as unenjoyable nonsense. Audiences may not even realize the fine nuances of what's making them reject a story, but a ghost story that descends into undisciplined randomness will lose audiences almost every time. Just because it's a ghost story doesn't furnish carte blanche to throw anything at the audience.
And so it is, in my opinion, with AURORA. And if the other user reviews around here are any indication, so it is with a lot of other AURORA audience members. While there are many elements to recommend AURORA, ultimately it expresses a poorly crafted and nonsensical story that wanders far into complete incoherency. And no matter how good the technical elements of a movie may be, if it doesn't have a well-crafted story to tell, it's not a good movie.
Because of this, I recommend taking a pass on AURORA.
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