I generally find Tom Hanks/ Spielberg productions annoying, but I LOVED this movie!

Rating: 10/10 (3 January 2005)

As stated in my title, I generally find Tom Hanks/ Spielberg movies to be totally monotonic and untextured, but I was entirely and delightfully surprised by this movie.
First of all (and I can't believe I'm saying this!) Hanks was absolutely fantastic in this movie--you forget who he is within a minute, and enjoy his utterly perfect depiction (including amazing accent!) of a stranded, bumbling-but-perceptive, idealistic-but-realistic, Eastern European man at the airport (indeed, it's a sign of a truly great performance when you focus on the character and NOT the marketed actor).
The supporting cast--especially the actor who plays Gupta, the elderly Indian janitor--are also fantastic, and help create an incredibly rich palette of character types that help make this movie so delightful.
And as cliché as the metaphor may seem, the themes of the airport "Terminal"--of people always coming and going but never taking the time to wait in between; or of people who spend their whole lives waiting but never go anywhere--are well-portrayed and very moving, without disturbing the comedic tempo of the movie (I swear I felt so moved, but laughed aloud multiple times). There are also some underlying themes about the "-cracies": democracy, bureaucracy, hypocrisy, etc.
Only annoying thing about the movie was the excessive number of product placements (Sbarro, Planters, Burger King, and so on)--though actually even this was kinda turned into a funny thing in a Truman-Show kind of way.
-->BTW, this movie definitely had some The Truman Show overtones to it, with the possibly kind-hearted but impossibly pedantic little bureaucratic man playing god from "above" (parallels between Tucci's and Harris' characters). Other Truman Show themes included freedom within constrained parameters, paradox of innocent idealism combined with realistic survival (Hanks and Carrey's roles), and of society micro-cosmically represented in an isolated community (airport, TV set).<--
Anyway, I highly recommend this movie!!! ~sone