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The Terminal
Cast: Tom Hanks, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Stanley Tucci, Diego Luna, Chi McBride
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Abstract: Viktor Navorski is a visitor to New York from Eastern Europe. His homeland erupts in a fiery coup, while he is in the air en route to America. Stranded at Kennedy Airport with a passport from nowhere, he is unauthorized to actually enter the United States and must improvise his days and nights in the terminal's international transit lounge, until the war at home is over. As the weeks and months stretch on, Viktor finds the compressed universe of the terminal to be a richly complex world of absurdity, generosity, ambition, amusement, status, serendipity--and even romance with a beautiful flight attendant named Amelia. But he has long worn out his welcome with airport official Frank Dixon, who considers Viktor a bureaucratic glitch--a problem he cannot control but wants desperately to erase.
He's not particularly sexy, nor is he trying to be attractive, he's just who he is, and I think that is what makes him so appealing.
I believed that he didn't speak English well, that he was merely subsisting on crackers with ketchup and mustard, and that he was a master contractor.
Catherine Zeta-Jones is simply luminous, and steals many scenes, but the focus is on Victor, stranded at JFK airport when his country is plunged into chaos by a coup, rendering him "unacceptable" to the United States government.
Stanley Tucci is as always remarkable with his steely eyes and perfectly villainous jawline. Zoe Saldana has a few gem-like scenes in which she lights up the screen with her smile, you'll see a lot more of her in the near future.
The brilliance of this film is that we can all relate. Who among us has not spent hours in an airport waiting for a flight? Multiply that by a few hundred times and we can really feel for Victor's plight. His resourcefulness is something we all like to believe we had inside of us, and the people he meets, we hope to make acquaintance with one day too.
A great movie to take a date, there's a little in it for him too, and he won't make you go see Chronicles of Riddick with him afterwards.
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Credit: Dreamworks Entertainment
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