Dreadful Movie

Rating: 1/10 (25 April 2005)

Painfully bad. A tremendous waste of talent, or perhaps a shocking rebuke of presumed talent. Spielberg should be ashamed. Although based on what could have been a poignant story of a man without a country trapped in an airport by faceless bureaucracy, instead we get a movie with all the character depth of a police academy movie.
One or two inane, illogical scenes might be written off to the "whimsical" nature of the movie--but this tripe is riddled with scenes that literally made me cringe. My eyes hurt from rolling them at the awful, cloying attempts at romance. My ears hurt from the insipid, unappealing characters spouting dialog that had all the verisimilitude of an infomercial. And then, there were all the ridiculous, contrived situations followed by more ridiculous, contrived situations. I had heard this movie was mediocre, but I was unprepared for the sheer torture of sitting through it.
Please, don't bother to respond if you found this movie at all enjoyable. If that is true, if you found a shred of value in this train wreck of a film, there is no level at which I could engage you--we have completely different systems of taste, art, values. You obviously exist in some parallel universe, a bizzaro-world where gravity must repel, fish ride bicycles, and really, really bad movies seem good.
For those who live in MY universe, though, I strongly urge you to avoid this movie. Avoid it at all costs.