![]() He ultimately manages to enter the country thanks to a one-day emergency travel visa, once the Krakozhian coup is over. His main character, Viktor Navorski, is confined to JFK International Airport because the government of his home country, Krakozhia, has been overthrown during his flight to the U.S. This absurd situation provides Spielberg with material for a comically Kafkaesque plot (McBride 488). He remained inside for eighteen years for lack of a national status that would have allowed him to either get into the U.S. or go home. As many critics have noted, the film is based on the true case of Mehran Karimi Nasseri, who lived in Charles de Gaulle Airport after his expulsion from Iran (Wasser 209). This may be due to The Terminal’s flimsy, life-inspired plot. Indeed, on the surface at least, the film conveys the carefree atmosphere of Spielberg’s pre-9/11 productions and may consequently appear ill-suited to his fans’ new areas of interest. Even though it was released in 2004, the film seems to contradict the view according to which, “in the post-9/11 world, a global audience responds to more critical views” (Wasser 4). It is aesthetic in that surveillance allows Spielberg to analyze power-related visual patterns in filmmaking, thus complementing the director’s critique of “scientific hubris” (Kendrick 184).ĢYet despite the prominence of Minority Report and other political works in Spielberg’s filmography, critics have often been only half-convinced about his commitment to directing “serious movies” alongside his “popcorn” productions (Wasser 10). It is political because of the way it exposes a totalitarian drift of surveillance, characterized, for instance, in the dystopian Minority Report. ![]() As I have shown in previous research (Lefait 59–66), his vision of surveillance is at once political and aesthetic. From Minority Report to The Terminal: Surveillance Ideology and the Scope of Spielberg’s CommitmentġJudging from his filmography, and especially from the “trilogy of terror” (Hoberman 128) in which he “addressed the national trauma and the repressive political climate of the George W. Bush-Dick Cheney era” (McBride 487), Spielberg is particularly concerned by the rise of surveillance societies.
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