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Terminal The Movie Is Much Better When It Stars Tom Hanks, Than When The Travellady Is The Lead

By Madelyn Miller

On New Year’s Day, I watched TheTerminal with a group of travel and foodie friends. It seemed an appropriate way to reflect on our journeys over the past year and look forward to trips coming up. We laughed at how preposterous the premise was, thoroughly entertained.

Flash forward five days.

I am trying to get from Dallas to Newark. My scheduled plane was cancelled. I was not too upset, because I knew there were flights every couple of hours. What I did not realize was the impact of one cancellation on the rest of the day.

To make a very long story short, I spent from 8:30 AM to 6:30 pm at Dallas Fort Worth airport, scurrying from gate to gate as the gates changed. I was one of dozens of people unable to get on a later flight.

It was no where nearly as charming or romantic as Tom Hanks made it seem. He may get an Oscar nomination; I only got grumpy and frustrated.

What I Learned From Tom Hanks

• Repossess a cart that someone has left behind. Make this your mobile vehicle

• Make friends with the airport staff. They can explain what is going on

What Tom Hanks Could Learn From Me

• Look for Free internet access at the Intel kiosks

• Keep checking the monitors, departing flights have frequent gate changes and delays—especially when the weather is bad

What I Wish I Had Done

            1. Set up my cellphone to automatically notify me of changes and delays.

More About The Movie 

Academy Award® winners Tom Hanks ("Philadelphia," "Forrest Gump") and Catherine Zeta-Jones ("Chicago") star in "The Terminal," under the direction of Academy Award®-winning filmmaker Steven Spielberg ("Schindler's List," "Saving Private Ryan").

"The Terminal" tells the story of Viktor Navorski (Tom Hanks), a visitor to New York from Eastern Europe, whose homeland erupts in a fiery coup while he is in the air en route to America.  Stranded at Kennedy 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, who considers him a bureaucratic glitch, a problem he cannot control but wants desperately to erase.

"The Terminal" also stars Emmy winner Stanley Tucci (TV's "Winchell," "Road to Perdition") as Frank Dixon.  Rounding out the main cast are Chi McBride (TV's "Boston Public"), Diego Luna ("Y Tu Mama, Tambien"), Kumar Pallana ("The Royal Tenenbaums"), Zoë Saldana ("Drumline") and Barry Shabaka Henley ("Ali").
            Walter F. Parkes ("Catch Me If You Can"), Laurie MacDonald ("The Ring") and Steven Spielberg produced "The Terminal," with Patricia Whitcher, Jason Hoffs and Andrew Niccol serving as executive producers.  The screenplay is by Sacha Gervasi and Jeff Nathanson, from a story by Niccol and Gervasi.

YOU DO NOT WANT TO HEAR MORE ABOUT MY DAY IN THE AIRPORT.

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