Life is waiting.
The terminal tells the story of Viktor Navorski (Tom Hanks), a visitor to New York from Eastern Europe, whose 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 unauthorised 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 (Catherine Zeta-Jones). But Viktor has long worn out his welcome with airport official Frank Dixon, who considers him a bureaucratic glitch, a problem he cannot control but wants desperately to erase.
Special Agent Matti
Despite being more than two hours long, The terminal is not as terminal as you would expect (see Cast away). Its saving grace is the humour: the romance is ok if you believe that sexy, young women prefer to fall in love with fat, old men; the irony is fine if you have ever been on the wrong end of a bureaucracy; the comedy is great because it's so unexpected. Tom Hanks really fits the part, other than being forced to say "Krakozia": it's a fictional country and it sounds like a fictional country. If they wanted a Russian-speaking country, then there's a list as long as your arm: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, the Ukraine and Uzbekistan. It's not as if the Cold War is still on and Hollywood has to be politically correct (Krakozia is subject to a military coup) to prevent unnecessary tensions. It's not as if other countries aren't criticised in other Hollywood films (eg China in Spy game).
Other than that, it's good.
PG (Low level coarse language, mature themes)
129 minutes (2:09 hours)
Film: 9 September 2004