Why Steven Spielberg’s Underrated 2004 film The Terminal is Worth a Second Look

By John David Ebert

A recent viewing of Steven Spielberg’s 2004 comedy The Terminal with Tom Hanks inspired me to write a brief retroactive review, since I realized just how rich with significance this film is. At first glance, its premise of a man who falls through the bureacratic cracks to take up his residence at J.F.K. Airport in New York sounds as though it may have been vaguely inspired by J.G. Ballard’s 1974 novel Concrete Island, which retells the story of Robinson Crusoe as a man who drives his car off an overpass and becomes stranded in the midst of a clover leaf of expressways proceeds to make a living for himself as a refugee of post-industrial society. However, when one realizes that the film was actually (loosely) based on the real life story of an Iranian man (Mehran Karimi Nasseri) who lived in Terminal One at Charles De Gaulle Airport in France for nearly twenty years (1998-2006), one begins to realize that Ballard’s novel was actually prescient of a coming situation: the fate of a newly emerging class of post-industrial refugees who cannot find a suitable place for themselves in a world of airports, freeways and office parks.

In the words of Giorgio Agamben, such individuals constitute “a state of exception” unto themselves. They fall under the jurisdiction of no country’s laws and therefore constitute a class of “non-citizens,” or to use Zygmunt Bauman’s phrase, they are “wasted lives” that nobody wants around. They are, in short, a form of collateral damage inflicted by globalization. Read the rest of this entry »