December 23, 2023 — The Terminal
8 min readDec 27, 2023
- (Intro to this series)
- (Previous Notes: Catch Me If You Can)
- (The Terminal on IMDb)
- Here’s a movie that… is directed by Steven Spielberg. And that stars Tom Hanks. It’s a pleasant and innocuous movie, as I recall. I saw it in the theater in 2004 and enjoyed it, and haven’t thought much about it since. Should I have been thinking about it more? I remember suspecting that one of the deciding factors in making this movie is that they could just build one set and shoot there every day for the whole movie. But I bet more charming memories will remind me of themselves here shortly. And I might figure out why this Steven Spielberg Tom Hanks Catherine Zeta-Jones movie never comes up in conversations.
- Opening just throws the title of the movie into the flippy-letter airport information sign. Then very crisply shot airport imagery. We see Stanley Tucci, an airport security boss monitoring activities on cameras. He is keen-eyed and detective-y.
- Meanwhile Tom Hanks is trying to get through passport control, but his passport won’t work. He doesn’t speak English, he’s from a fictional country with a Cyrillic alphabet called Krakozhia. ST and his deputy explain to him that his country fell apart during his flight and the US can’t let him in, but he doesn’t understand English so really this exposition is just for us. It’s funny that TH responds to this information with “where to I buy the Nike shoes”. He seems very innocent. Meanwhile, we get that he has no choice but to pass the time in the “International Transit Lounge”, indefinitely.
- The International Transit Lounge is not a lounge, it’s the part of an airport terminal with shops, the area between gates and security. This one has a Borders!
- TH glimpses harrowing bits of Krakozhia news on monitors, he doesn’t know what has happened to his family but there is war in his home and it makes him cry.
- He had gotten some meal vouchers from the deputy, but he clumsily lost them. A janitor character he interacts with is crazy and unhelpful and we hope we see him some more.
- At night he explores and finds a closed gate area, under construction or something. Physical comedy about trying to sleep on those crappy chairs. He jerry-rigs a bed-like surface out of them and shuts off the lights at the breaker box, so we see he has some ingenuity.
- ST is getting a promotion and he is jazzed about it, but he sees TH on the monitor doing I-guess-I-live-here activities in a bath robe and he’s like, shit.
- Zoe Saldana! She’s an officer in immigration with no help to offer.
- He tries to catch up with the janitor but the janitor just acts crazy. He sees chocolates in a shop but has no money and no vouchers so he makes a sandwich of Saltines and ketchup. I don’t want any.
- ST really wants TH to just sneak out, it’s what anyone else would do, but TH doesn’t get it. Or maybe he kind of does, since he senses that the cameras are watching him. He tells a camera I WAIT.
- First sighting of Catherine Zeta-Jones, she’s a flight attendant who loses a heel. He’s nice to her. She then goes and kisses a boyfriend.
- TH spots someone putting a cart back into a cart rack and collecting a quarter deposit, figures out he can round up carts and get lots of quarters that way. Deputy and his crew watch this unfold with visible respect.
- Days pass. He uses his quarters to buy translations of magazines to learn English. ZS is warming up to him. Diego Luna has a delivery job and is paying attention. ST sabotages the quarter scam and TH goes back to Saltine sandwiches.
- 0:37:36 — Okay I was tacitly derisive of the physical comedy a bit ago, but a scene where TH tries to mop up a mess, is scolded for that by Janitor, and then slips on that spot, it was super funny physical comedy. Tom Hanks is an actor of the highest charisma.
- DL schemes to befriend TH because he is in love with ZS. Seems like a reach that he would go to great lengths to recruit TH to help him woo a woman, but it’s also all cute.
- 0:43:20 — He gets paged, what? He has a pager and he knows It is good news. But is it? It’s a meeting with ST. He has a decent-sounding plan that requires TH to say he has a credible fear of returning home. He can’t say that, it’s an integrity thing. So he stays in the airport.
- He overhears CZJ talking to the boyfriend who is married and she is the mistress and is heartbroken. They hang out a bit. That ends with her suggesting they go to a not-in-the-airport restaurant. He can’t explain why he can’t and she gets upset.
- Then… okay he decides he needs enough money to take her out on a date. He asks different stores to hire him and that doesn’t go anywhere. After giving up on that, he retreats to his under-construction gate area and starts literally remodeling part of it. He does that all night and the real remodelers catch him doing it the next morning and they hire him because “look at that cornice work”. It’s just a strange little stretch of story, not very credible.
- Then he hangs out in the baggage area with DL, Janitor, and Chi McBride. They run him through the x-ray machine and play cards with him.
- Another encounter with CZJ shows them getting chummier and she kind of fancies him.
- ST is frustrated & can’t find a way to get TH out, and there are important people coming that he wants to impress. A problem comes up with a Russian that got caught with some pills, ST asks TH to help translate. If he helps, says ST, then “green stamp”. It looks bad for the Russian, so TH alters the story to be that the pills are just goat medicine. They cuff the Russian and are going to drag him away but the Russian says “goat”. We all think that TH probably made up the goat part to help him. ST is hopping mad and bullies him at a photocopy machine that makes copies of TH’s hand a bunch, all while the important people were watching and not impressed.
- Somehow the story got around to Janitor, and a bunch of the hand photocopies are up at the food court places and the food court workers smile and nod at him in a way that makes me glad I was never an actor that had to “just nod and smile in admiration”.
- TH is still working on a plan to take CZJ on a date even though she seems interested enough without extra effort and also he can’t leave the terminal and isn’t telling her why. His closest pals are helping him, that’s Janitor, DL, and CB. They sneak into an office to figure out when she’ll be passing through the airport again.
- Janitor tells a story about how in India, a cop was shaking him down for protection money so he stabbed him (non-fatally) and fled to the US. Dark. But then a cute rom-com sequence happens because CZJ shows up and the pals orchestrate a choreographed routine to get her to fall into his lap, and then he asks her on a date which turns out to be a staged situation in a private area of the terminal with the pals waiting on them and entertaining them with barely-perceptible charm. Janitor does neat spinning plate stuff though.
- There’s this thing about her pager. She’s like “I’ve been waiting for a page for 7 years, I know it’s going to come, it’s why I live out of a suitcase”, and she’s just talking about her married lover, it seems like more info is needed for me to actually empathize. The two of them cathartically throw their pagers onto the tarmac. It isn’t as cathartic for me.
- In other coupling news, DL and ZS have apparently been getting along fine, even though we never actually saw them together, because DL uses TH’s go-betweening to propose to her. M’kay.
- ST has detained CZJ to get intel on TH. But he only asks her why she likes him and she’s like MEN LIKE YOU WOULD NEVER GET IT.
- So now CZJ knows he’s squatting there, not a workin’ road warrior at all, and she feels betrayed because she dumped her dude and is free to date TH but now she doesn’t trust him. But wait, he made a dazzling, intricate mosaic fountain in the airport for her. He, again, constructed a mosaic fountain by the gates. Then he tells her the story of how his father was into jazz and for 40 years he solicited jazz greats by mail to get their autographs, and got all but one of his favorites, and TH came to New York just to get that last autograph, even though his father died. But he spins it to be “I wait for you” and she kisses him.
- 1:42:40 — The Krakozhia war has ended. An unrealistic number of people are celebrating that with TH and the pals in a terminal bar. Also CZJ gives him a one-day visa to do his thing in New York, but she had to un-dump the dude to get it.
- Now the plot “thickens” because ST got his promotion and has power, and he wants to use his power to make TH leave the country without running his NYC errand. It’s so important to ST that he says he will have the pals all arrested, and Janitor deported, unless he gets the next flight to Krakozhia. But Janitor doesn’t think TH should buckle to this demand, so he does a conspicuously crazy thing on the runway and gets arrested so that he will be deported anyway, and that delays TH’s flight anyway, the whole village rallies around TH and forms a parade to the exit doors, where ST’s employees defy their orders and let him leave. TH and CZJ pass each other in the pickup area and exchange a tacitly affectionate glance. ST is furious… but then just snaps out of it and becomes a likable character. He goes and gets the autograph, and John Williams music gives it gravity.
- So, I was expecting this to hold up better, not sure why. This movie isn’t very well-written, and I think having Steven Spielberg as its director normally would have been overkill, but they needed his touch just to hold your interest despite the weak plot. What would have hurt the movie even more would have been to have a less universally-beloved actor in the lead role. Worth noting is that they did a good job with the airport set, it was big and authentic-looking. I would recommend this movie to anyone that absolutely has to have a movie playing on a screen, but not to someone who is truly interested in watching a good movie.
- (Next: War of the Worlds)
