director
Steven Spielberg
screenwriters
Sacha Gervasi
Jeff Nathanson
story by
Andrew Niccol
Sacha Gervasi
producers
Laurie MacDonald
Walter F. Parkes
Steven Spielberg
cinematographer
Janusz Kaminski
music
John Williams
editor
Michael Kahn
cast
Tom Hanks (Viktor Navorski)
Catherine Zeta-Jones (Amelia Warren)
Stanley Tucci (Frank Dixon)
Chi McBride (Mulroy)
Diego Luna (Enrique Cruz)
Barry Henley (Thurman)
Kumar Pallana (Gupta Rajan)
Zoe Saldana (Torres)
Eddie Jones (Salchak)
Michael Nouri (Max)
mpaa rating: PG-13
running
time: 128m
u.s.
release: 6/18/04
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
official
website
other steven
spielberg films
reviewed on this website:
- a.i.:
artificial intelligence
- amistad
- catch
me if you can
- close
encounters of the third kind
- e.t.
(special edition, 2002)
- jurassic
park
- the
lost world: jurassic park
- minority
report
- munich
- saving
private ryan
- schindler's
list
- war
of the worlds
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With The Terminal, Steven
Spielberg gives us an amiable if rather toothless fable about
a man without a country. Viktor Navorski (Tom Hanks), a citizen
of the nation of Krakhozia, has come to New York on unspecified
business. As luck would have it, Krakhozia has fallen to revolutionaries,
so Viktor's passport is rendered invalid, and he's stuck at JFK
International Airport until ... well, nobody really knows. The
problem with The Terminal is that it's also about a man
without an identity.
Viktor is based, incredibly
enough, on a real-life case -- an Iranian named Merhan Karimi
Nasseri, who got waylaid at De Gaulle Airport in 1988 and has
resided there ever since. Nasseri's story sounds more interesting
-- and more spikily human -- than what Spielberg and his writers
(Sacha Gervasi and Jeff Nathanson) have gleaned from the basic
premise. Viktor falls into a routine at the well-appointed airport,
a shining oasis with its own restaurants and stores; he figures
out how to earn pocket change from collecting luggage carts,
and he subsists on crackers and sleeps on rows of cushioned terminal
seats. Viktor is a can-do kind of guy -- the sort of ingenious
immigrant that forged America itself, Spielberg is saying.
What passes for conflict here
comes from the airport's security officer (Stanley Tucci), a
harried and impersonal drone who just wants Viktor off his radar.
It's a contest between two kinds of single-mindedness -- the
optimistic old-country kind and the jaded urban kind. Viktor
won't budge, even when given a chance to leave illegally. You
sense he's dealt with this kind of bureaucrat many times in Krakhozia.
After a career of films spanning continents and centuries, Spielberg
narrows the struggle of the human condition down to one building
and one man. The Terminal is Spielberg consciously downsizing.
But one can't help thinking that he did this sort of minimalism
better, and with much more verve, in early thrillers like Duel
and the last hour of Jaws.
Tom Hanks keeps his end of
the bargain. He's practically the whole show, as he was in Cast
Away (which this movie resembles in its theme of a marooned
man making the best of a bad situation), and he works up a satisfyingly
twisty accent that loosens up a bit as the movie goes on and
Viktor learns more English. (All told, he's stuck at the airport
for nine months -- are we supposed to read a birth metaphor into
that?) Hanks is now the all-American go-to guy (he rose to the
position after Harrison Ford seemed to disregard it), and his
performance as a foreigner is full of comic bits of incomprehension
giving way to a native shrewdness. But after spending over two
hours with Viktor, we've learned almost nothing about him except
the contents of his mysterious can of Planters peanuts (and the
heart-tugging backstory behind it). We leave with clearer impressions
of the people Viktor meets, such as a lovestruck cafeteria worker
(Diego Luna) or a floor-mopping Indian refugee (Kumar Pallana,
veteran of three Wes Anderson films).
Spielberg tries to inject a
love story between Viktor and a romantically confused flight
attendant (Catherine Zeta-Jones), but the subplot feels strained
and groundless, leaving Zeta-Jones with virtually nothing to
play. Eventually, The Terminal swells up to full Capra
idolatry, surrounding Viktor with his new friends in shots that
make It's a Wonderful Life look like a chilly art-house
film. Spielberg has set himself the challenge of one location
and a near-plotless structure, and the movie is certainly fluidly
directed - he keeps it going almost as an exercise, the way Hitchcock
took on the technical obstacles of Rope. But in the end,
you're not quite sure why, other than the chance to play on what's
been advertised as the biggest set in movie history, Spielberg
has picked this story to tell. There's very little of him in
it except the part of himself that can't resist schmaltz.
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