![]() ![]() Viktor’s initial encounters with these individuals are the sort of impersonal public interactions that occur between people whose paths are unlikely to cross again. Only the flight attendant comes and goes the others, like Viktor, are permanent fixtures of terminal life, except that they go home at night. Those whose lives he touches include an attractive flight attendant named Amelia (Catherine Zeta-Jones), a trio of airport employees, and a pretty INS agent (Zoe Saldana). But then a character makes a supposedly heartwarming sacrifice that, viewed rationally, seems inescapably misguided and even if we ignore that, what about the other characters who’ve been threatened over Viktor’s mission? Are we meant to conclude that the mission is worth their grief too? Are we not supposed to think about them?įortunately, the film is actually less interested in Viktor’s mission than in the relationships he forms along the way. These consequences are so extreme and disproportionate that Viktor himself decides, reasonably and not terribly nobly given the stakes, that the mission isn’t worth the cost. The film has some creative tricks up its sleeve in this connection, but eventually missteps with phony drama threatening dire consequences for a number of supporting characters if Viktor attempts to complete his mission. ![]() There’s also a misguided subplot having to do with the reason for Viktor’s trip to New York, a personal mission that remains a secret for much of the film but seems to have something to do with a mysterious cannister that he carries around with him and sometimes kisses. The other difference is that where the point in Cast Away was in part how profoundly Hanks’s workaholic character was changed by his experiences, in The Terminal Viktor is already the most well-adjusted, centered character in the film, and the point isn’t how he changes or what he has to learn, but what he has to teach us. It’s a bit like Cast Away, except that for companionship there are real people instead of a volleyball and a photograph. But Spielberg is more interested in feel-good comedy than social commentary, and so the story focuses less on Viktor’s bureaucratic predicament than on the mechanics of how he actually goes about the business of survival in the terminal as well as the people he meets there and the relationships he forms. In today’s post-9/11 world, this premise seems both charmingly naive and satirically topical. To airport security, embodied in Frank Dixon (Stanley Tucci), the ambitious acting security chief, Viktor’s circumstance is a daily nuisance. He’s in limbo, and the boundaries of his world are the concrete and glass walls of the airport terminal. There seems to be no bureaucratically correct response to Viktor’s unique situation: no legal way to admit, deport, detain, or otherwise process him. Viktor Navorski (Hanks) thus arrives in JFK Airport a citizen of no recognized country, with no valid passport or money, no legal documentation, status, or identity of any kind. Loosely inspired by the true story of an Iranian refugee without documentation stranded for over a decade in a Paris airport, The Terminal hypothesizes a citizen of a tiny, fictional eastern European country whose government vanishes in a violent coup while he is en route to New York City. In Spielberg and Hanks’s professional hands the whole package remains passably entertaining, but much of it doesn’t bear thinking about afterwards not because the premise is implausible, but because, granted the premise, characters do things that no one would, or should, do under those circumstances. And the climax (hastily rewritten and reshot mere weeks before opening day) is pretty much unsalvageable. The story wobbles between plotlines and characters that make emotional sense and ones that don’t. ![]() However, the seams are more obvious this time around. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |