Terminator

The Terminal's tag-line is "Life is Waiting". Actually, we're still waiting, not so much for life -- which arrives in many surprising ways in the airport terminal that is the setting for the movie -- but for a reason why the movie was made. Maestro Steven Spielberg and American Everyman Tom Hanks team to make this feel-good flick passable entertainment, but at almost 2 hours 20 minutes, it's clear that there was no real driving rationale behind the tale.

Sure, there are plenty of fun characters and mildly inventive episodes all wrapped up in a diverting tale. But one spends time watching the movie trying to figure out if the main character is an idiot savant, a lucky bumbler, or just an out of work construction laborer.

Hank's plays Victor Nagorsky, a stranded traveller from some "stan"-suffix country which has undergone a coup. Without a visa (or whatever), he is stuck in the airport waiting on the beaurocracy to sort out the paperwork. A fine premise for a film as long as we don't spend much time on the details....

So why do we spend so much time on the details? Is the story really about how one man confronts a faceless beaurocracy and a triumph of the human spirit? But it's not faceless : Stanley Tucci plays the airport's acting security manager, a by-the-book workaholic who spends his time watching Nagorsky on large monitors (too expensive for the government or JFK, I'd think) (and quite like watching Tom Cruise's detective work during "Minority Report"). Depending on the scene, Tucci is a nasty boss or maybe just a stickler for detail. Does he end the movie on an epiphany? Or does he just give up?

Same for Nagorsky. We're not told a single detail of his background, so he is a cipher to us, just as America (or at least JFK)  is unknowable beyond the few words of English he can speak. However, this anti-character never adds up to someone we care about, except for the fact that he's Tom Hanks. At times he is a near idiot at other times cleverer than anyone else at the airport.

By the end of the film, his character's grand secret is revealed and it answers almost nothing about why he's acted the way he has for the previous two hours. His final denouement is a let-down, almost like "Close Encounters of the Third Kind", where Richard Dreyfuss entered the alien spaceship to an unknown journey in the original, in the re-released version we are shown the interior of the craft, which is of course just more colored, meaningless lights.

All said and done, this is passable entertainment. Spielberg keeps the episodes flowing, Hanks is of course endearing, and there's a very game cast of supporting characters. But in the end, there's little here to remember after you've left the gate.