Media Type : Cinema/Theatre | Rating : 6.0 out of 10 | Watched on : June 19^th, 2004

Release Date : June 18^th, 2004 | New & Used DVD Price : Not known at time of this post

Buy this DVD

I saw this movie on June 19th, 2004. The movie centers around a European traveler who comes to New York for a purpose. Even though many people around the web have been calling him an immigrant, that is wrong. He is not an immigrant in the movie. He plans to go back to his country throughout the movie, back to his home. The story line is simple, yet a bit unique [based on a true story, though under different circumstances]; a traveler arrives at the JFK airport to find that he cannot be allowed admission to the country because his home country has been under a coupe and now the traveler cannot enter the United States. He is told to stay within the airport until the situation resolves. The whole movie is around this whole experience and how Tom Hanks copes with this situation and how he meets different people and how in the end, he gets what he came to do.

The movie has some very interesting characters, and some characters which were not needed. Catherine Zeta-Jones is one of those unwanted characters, in my opinion. Why would she be needed in a movie when all she does is act like she is desperate for guys, and she has no strong lines or things to either show or portray in her character. As a matter of fact, her character has no significance at all, and is less important than any of the other characters shown in the movie. Why Spielberg would cast her into the movie leaves only one answer; he needed some big name besides Tom to be in the movie. It was maybe because Bernie Mac was supposed to be one of the characters in it, and when he could not be in it, he decided to get someone else, and along came Catherine.

The movie builds the story line very nicely, and Tom Hanks acts in a very realistic manner. This movie may have some similar emotional effect on the audience like Cast Away; even though these two movies have little in common, they do portray a traveler in a strange land [for them] where they have to survive until they move on to where they want to go. The ending of the movie is nice just like the rest of the movie. Even though it is a bit hard to imagine a traveler learning to speak English well enough to communicate with almost anyone within a short span of time only from travel books, the movie does portray a bit of reality from the strong portrayal of Tom’s character. Overall, a good movie to see; if only the dvd version has all the Catherine Zeta-Jones scenes deleted [except the one when Tom tells her the exact purpose of his visit to the US], I would pre-order the dvd. Maybe I still would get the dvd, since overall the movie is too good to be put down because of a single character. This is a good movie to see with almost anyone at the theatres now.