Tagline: Life is waiting. Waiting can be exciting. Waiting can be entertaining.
The Terminal tells the story of Viktor Navorski (Tom Hanks), a visitor to New York City from Eastern Europe, whose homeland erupts in a fiery coup while he is in the air en route to America. Stranded at John F. Kennedy International 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.
Viktor Navorski (Tom Hanks) arrives at JFK International Airport, but finds that he is not allowed to enter the United States. While he was en route to the US, a revolution was started in his home nation of Krakozhia. Due to the civil war, the United States no longer recognizes Krakozhia as a sovereign nation and denies Viktor’s entrance to the US. Unable to leave the airport or return to Krakozhia, Viktor instead lives in the terminal, carrying his luggage and a mysterious Planters peanut can.
Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Head Frank Dixon (Stanley Tucci) wants Navorski removed from the airport. Navorski collects money for food by retrieving vacant baggage trolleys for the 25-cent reward from the machine, until Dixon prevents this. He then befriends a catering car driver named Enrique (Diego Luna) who gives him food in exchange for information about a female Customs and Border Protection officer (Zoë Saldana), who Enrique is infatuated with. With Viktor’s help, Enrique and Dolores eventually marry each other. He meets flight attendant Amelia Warren (Catherine Zeta-Jones), who asks him out to dinner, but he tries to earn money in order to ask Amelia out instead. He finally gets an off-the-books job as a construction worker at the airport earning $19 an hour.
Viktor is asked to interpret for a desperate Russian man with undocumented drugs for his sick father. Viktor claims it is “medicine for goat,” barring the drug from confiscation and resolving the crisis. Under pressure and the watchful eye of the Airport Ratings committee, who is evaluating Dixon for an upcoming promotion, Dixon has a falling out with Viktor. Though Dixon is advised that sometimes rules must be ignored, he becomes obsessed with getting Viktor ejected from the airport. An airport janitor, Gupta Rajan (Kumar Pallana), exaggerates the “goat” incident to his fellow co-workers and as a result, Viktor earns the respect and admiration of all of the airport staff.
One day, Viktor explains to Amelia that the purpose of his visit to New York is to collect an autograph from the tenor saxophonist Benny Golson. It is revealed that the peanut can Viktor carries with him contains nothing more than an autographed copy of the “Great Day in Harlem” photograph. His late father was a jazz enthusiast who had discovered the famous portrait in a Hungarian newspaper in 1958, and vowed to get an autograph of all the 57 jazz musicians featured on the photograph. He succeeded in obtaining 56, but died before he could finish his collection.
The Terminal is a 2004 American comedy-drama film directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Tom Hanks, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Chi McBride, Stanley Tucci, Diego Luna, Kumar Pallana, Zoe Saldana, Eddie Jones, Jude Ciccolella, Corey Reynolds and Guillermo Díaz.
The film is about a man who becomes stuck in New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport terminal when he is denied entry into the United States and at the same time cannot return to his native country because of a military coup. It grossed $77,872,883 in North America and $141,544,372 in other territories, totaling $219,417,255 worldwide. The clarinet piece, “Viktor’s Tale”, also composed by John Williams, is taken from the movie’s soundtrack.
Krakozhia (Кракозия or Кракожия) is a fictional country, created for the film, that closely resembles a former Soviet Republic or Eastern Bloc state. The exact location of Krakozhia is kept intentionally vague in the film, keeping with the idea of Viktor being simply Eastern European or from a former Soviet Republic.
However, in one of the scenes, a map of Krakozhia is briefly displayed on one of the airport’s television screens during a news report on the ongoing conflict and its borders are those of the Republic of Macedonia, but in another scene the protagonist shows his driving license, which happens to be a Belarusian license issued to a woman. The film presents a reasonably accurate picture of the process of naturalistic second-language acquisition, according to professional linguist Martha Young-Scholten. John Williams, the film’s composer, also wrote a national anthem for Krakozhia.
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The Terminal (2004)
Directed by: Steven Spielberg
Starring: Tom Hanks, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Chi McBride, Stanley Tucci, Diego Luna, Kumar Pallana, Zoe Saldana, Eddie Jones, Jude Ciccolella, Corey Reynolds, Guillermo Díaz
Screenplay by: Sacha Gervasi, Jeff Nathanson
Production Design by: Alex McDowell
Cinematography by: Janusz Kaminski
Film Editing by: Michael Kahn
Costume Design by: Mary Zophres
Set Decoration by: Anne Kuljian
Art Direction by: Christopher Burian-Mohr, Brad Ricker
Music by: John Williams
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for brief language and drug references.
Distributed by: DreamWorks Pictures
Release Date: June 18, 2004
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