Now Boarding... Or Not At All

If you travel by air, even occasionally, chances are you have been stuck in an airport terminal at one time or another. I don't know anyone who hasn't spent longer sitting in an airport chair than the airplane ride itself at some point. Airports have become small microcosms of society. There are places to eat, places to shop, places to meet people...

If you're going to be stuck somewhere, an airport can actually be a fascinating place to be. They are places of high emotion, people are either saying goodbye or saying hello. There are intense reunions or the anticipation of absence. You get to see a cross-section of humanity parading through, and if you look at it that way, it's not the worst place to spend a few hours.

That being said, most people still view getting delayed at the airport for a few hours as an inconvenience. But try to imagine those hours stretching into days, weeks, and even months. That incredible circumstances is the premise of "The Terminal" by Steven Spielberg.

The movie told the story of Viktor Navorsky (Tom Hanks), an entirely fictional character from the equally fictitious Eastern European country of Krakozhia, who is en route to New York City when his country is torn apart by war. Viktor lands in New York only to discover that his identity has become a casualty of the war at home, and to be told that "America is closed", at least to him.

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.

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 (Stanley Tucci), who considers him a bureaucratic glitch, a problem he cannot control but wants desperately to erase.

So, almost everybody has been stuck in an airport. I have, several times. And I kinda enjoy them. How about you?

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UPDATE
Click here for a good review on this movie. (By Shinta)