The Terminal

I saw The Terminal, starring Tom Hanks, last night. In the movie, a man gets stuck in the International Transit Section of JFK when his passport ceases being valid while he is in route to the city. He’s stuck there nine months. This reminded me of Merhan Karimi Nasseri, a man who was really without a country-only instead of being stuck at JFK for nine months, he was stuck at Charles De Gaulle for over a decade. Naturally the movie is based on this man, but I think they did an injustice moving it to an American airport — especially since I’ve never seen an airport in America set up the way JFK was supposedly set-up.

Interestingly, in an odd way, this reminded me very much of Cast Away, the movie in which Tom Hanks portrays a man stuck alone on an island without escape. In fact, now that I think about it, this is essentially the same story, just a different setting. In Cast Away, Hanks’ character becomes more comfortable with the setting and successfully lives in a place inhospitable to him; the same story at JFK-only instead of a tropical island, it is an international transit lounge at an airport.