Image by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay [NOTE: Follow the link here to read “Part One” of this blog.] The Terminal (2004)
After watching A.I. Artificial Intelligence, I did not think that Spielberg could get any more sentimental. But then I watched his 2004 dramedy The Terminal and was proven very wrong. Not that that’s a bad thing; in fact, I think that this movie might just be Spielberg’s most overrated movie he’s ever made. The Terminal stars Tom Hanks (in his third of five acting collaborations with Spielberg) as Viktor Navorski, a man from a fictional Eastern European nation who becomes embroiled in a rather unique predicament. Upon arrival at JFK International Airport in New York City, Viktor is denied entry to America due to his invalid passport which, in turn, is the result of a military coup in his home country that has resulted in the U.S. government no longer recognizing the passport issued to Viktor by his country’s former regime. Thus, Viktor has no choice but to make the best of an unhappy situation by turning the terminal into his home and befriending the employees who work there and travelers who frequent there. Coming off of such intense dramas as Amistad and Saving Private Ryan and more character-driven thrillers like Minority Report and Catch Me If You Can, Spielberg arguably created his most “feel-good” movie since E.T. And, unsurprisingly, much of this film’s heart emanates from its central performance embodied by the one-of-a-kind persona that is Tom Hanks. Of course, The Terminal has the potential to be completely ruined by an overly hokey and simplistic portrayal of this ignorant, yet well-intentioned, immigrant man in a very unfamiliar environment. Fortunately, Hanks toes that line and effectively makes the audience fall in love with Viktor only minutes after meeting him. While Hanks is undeniably the star of this film, there are some solid supporting actors that prop up Viktor’s character and delight in their own way. I personally enjoyed Stanley Tucci’s take on the corporate airport employee who serves as the film’s primary antagonist. He never comes off as excessively cartoonish yet injects an intense zeal into his character Frank Dixon’s burning passion to pass on the quagmire that is Viktor’s residency status to someone else and unburden himself of the problem. Furthermore, the romance may be the weakest element of the film but I did appreciate Hanks’s chemistry with Catherine Zeta-Jones’s character Amelia Warren, a flight attendant who is the under the impression that Viktor is a traveling building contractor. And his rapport with Diego Luna’s youthful janitor character Enrique Cruz (among the other airport employees) was always thoroughly enjoyable to watch. But at the heart of The Terminal is a highly relatable and touching message about what a true family—and a true home—is really about. Yes, it’s not trying to accomplish much more than that. But by the same token, it doesn’t really need to. I’d rather Spielberg offer up a well-made “feel-good” flick with little ambitions than a weighty political or historical drama that stumbles more often than it soars. At the end of the day, The Terminal is not a masterpiece but it is undeniably Spielberg’s most underrated movie. Sure, it oozes sentimentality to the point of turning some people away. However, Hanks pulls off such a story with enough grace to reign me into watching it every time. War Horse (2011) In many ways, it was my viewing of Spielberg’s 2011 war drama War Horse that inspired me to devote an entire future blog to films centered on animals as characters. I certainly was not anticipating that going into this movie, but I am grateful that I watched it because it not only impressed me as a more recent yet little-talked-about Spielberg flick but also moved me in a way I didn’t think was probably. Like other films focused on the experience of an animal character, Spielberg puts an Irish Hunter horse Joey at the center of the narrative of War Horse with great inherent challenges. Perhaps I sound trite, so let me elaborate on this point for a moment. It’s admittedly easy for a storyteller (particularly of the visual persuasion) to evoke an audience’s sympathies for an animal. Put them in danger or at the hands of an abusive owner or see them overcome a challenge or obstacle in their path. Easy, right? But to truly make a great film with an animal as the focal point of the story, one must use the human characters around that animal to craft an emotionally satisfying arc for them. In the case of War Horse, Spielberg shows the horrors of war through the eyes of Joey by interweaving the overcoming of obstacles and trauma into the narrative. Furthermore, that narrative is driving towards what the audience ultimately wants for Joey: to see him reunited with his original owner-turned-soldier, Albert (Jeremy Irvine). With the added-on difficulty of Albert’s life under threat, the audience clamors for nearly two hours of the film’s runtime for Joey to find Albert again. Through the good and bad owners, uplifting moments and tragic ones, Spielberg delivers in the third act how any film like this should end: the audience gets what they want and thus feel satisfied by the end. It is this beating heart of Albert and Joey’s friendship that makes War Horse a meaningful movie, but it has other great qualities too. For one, Spielberg challenges his filmmaking skills by trying to bring the realism to the trenches of the First World War that he brought to the beaches and towns of the Second World War. While this film is not a masterpiece war movie in the way that Saving Private Ryan, Spielberg does not hold back in reminding just how good he is at capturing war in all of its devastation, despair, and hauntingly breathtaking beauty. Ultimately, this film has seared itself into my memory because it pulled off what few films these days have done: it caused me to tear up. If you don’t know me personally, I unashamedly admit that I am cynical bastard that rarely sheds tears for fictional characters. However, War Horse pulled it off. Is it just because I consider myself an animal lover? … Maybe. 😊 But it’s also the fact that Spielberg knows how to tug at the viewers’ heartstrings in order to make us care about the main character (despite the fact that that character lacks the ability to speak or evoke emotion in any relatable way). Mainly for that reason, War Horse is not only one of my favorite Spielberg films but (in my humble opinion) it’s one of his best films. Period. Lincoln (2012) Unlike most of the Spielberg films that I’ve written about last week and this week, I not only saw Lincoln when it came out in theaters but have also rewatched it several times since then. And going into my most recent rewatch, I was certain it wouldn’t hit the same highs that it did when I first saw it. In fact… I liked it more this time. 😊 This film is exceptional for so many reasons, and excels as more than just a straight-up political drama. First and foremost, the star of Lincoln is…well, Lincoln. Daniel Day-Lewis (My Left Foot, There Will Be Blood) pulls off what is arguably the performance of his career. But what he pulls off in Lincoln is (in my humble opinion) nearly impossible. In virtually every scene he is in, he puts on screen a version of the 16th American president that feels both grounded and grandiose. Whether it be carrying his youngest son Thomas “Tad” (Gulliver McGrath) to bed, arguing with his emotionally distraught wife Mary Todd (Sally Field), or having a tense standoff with his eldest son Robert (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) about fighting in the war, Day-Lewis’s Abraham Lincoln is brought down to the level of a loving but stern father and sympathetic but distant husband. This might seem relatively easy to pull off. And, in many other films with many other characters, it can be. But let’s remind ourselves that second perhaps only to George Washington, “Honest Abe” may very well be the most glorified, romanticized, mythologized, and deified politician in American history. Thus, the burden on Day-Lewis’s shoulders to make Lincoln a movie about a wearied and perseverant man who just so happens to be one of the most important people in the world who is self-described as “clothed in immense power” cannot be exaggerated. Of course, this accomplishment could not work as well it does in isolation. Instead, Lincoln includes some incredibly supporting performances from several actors. One that I feel is very noteworthy is Sally Field (Norma Rae, Places in the Heart) who pulls off the difficult task of highlighting the distress of Mary Todd Lincoln as both the First Lady with the responsibility of preserving her husband’s legacy and a perpetually mourning mother who feels emotionally neglected by her president-husband. This character could easily feel two-dimensional and unlikeable. However, Field gives us a woman deeply troubled by her family’s trauma and the tumultuous times that she lives in without ever losing sight of what possibly made the real Mary Todd an interesting woman: the grace with which she handled the unimaginable travails of life as wife to the president overseeing a nation divided by civil war. Unsurprisingly, the other exceptional supporting performer is none other than Tommy Lee Jones (The Fugitive, Men in Black, No Country for Old Men) as the spirited yet churlish Republican Congressman Thaddeus Stevens. Not only does Jones inject Stevens with a charming and fiery nature as the prime radical abolitionist perspective in the movie, but his dialogue is some of the well-crafted and hard-hitting examples of humor in its script. Without question, he has my favorite line of the film: “It opens.” But beyond just his ability to add levity to the drama, Jones ends up endearing the audience to Stevens for his idealism without ever making him out as a satirical or cartoonish example of the “outsider” in American politics. Not an easy feat for sure (especially these days). As a whole, Lincoln is perhaps the best example of Spielberg’s uncanny ability to dramatize political theater without resorting to hyperbole or romantic notions of politicking. He films scenes of political operatives offering patronage to Democratic Congressmen in exchange for their votes and tense discussions between the President and his cabinet about the legal applications and constraints of executive power in such a way to make them solid entertainment. But he never strips this kind of story of its need to convey relevant and (mostly) accurate historical context or overtones. I hope to expand on this point in a future blog, but I’ll leave it here for now. I have little more to say to convince you to watch Lincoln if you’re not already convinced to do so. Except that it shocked me in just how much it landed this time around and made me think twice about whether or not it is my favorite Spielberg film of all time. Need I say more? Ready Player One (2018) Knowing the basic premise of Spielberg’s first science fiction film since 2005’s War of the Worlds, I was admittedly skeptical of its ability to win me over. Most films that rely primarily on pop-culture references to craft a meaningful story tend to become trapped in the inherent pitfalls of such a construct so as to prioritize style over substance. But after watching Ready Player One, I was once again reminded of Spielberg’s talent for making a thoroughly entertaining movie that includes both. What immediately impressed me about Spielberg’s direction in Ready Player One was how he managed to craft a look for the world of the OASIS (the virtual-reality simulator played by the characters in the film) that balanced a heavily-CGI aesthetic with believable environments and interactions between players. This was arguably the biggest challenge of adapting Ernest Cline’s 2011 novel into a movie, and yet Spielberg makes the audience buy into the color palette and physics of the OASIS not long into the first act at all. Of course, the other major potential drawback of Ready Player One is its excessive use of “easter eggs” inspired by pop culture of and nostalgia for the 1980s. Admittedly, there are some scenes (particularly the final battle) where Spielberg simply cannot avoid this problem. However, considering how many intellectual properties are referenced throughout the film’s 140-minute runtime he shows a fair amount of restraint in place of offering a reasonably compelling story about reminding ourselves to disconnect now and then and enjoy our real lives and the people in them. All this is to say that I don’t think that Ready Player One is a great movie. It struggled to retain my interest start to finish, and many of the supporting characters lack the focus they probably deserve. Of course, the nostalgia-heavy overtones of the film’s action sequences have surely turned off some fans of Spielberg’s other work. However, I think that the movie has received unfair criticism given how entertaining and enjoyable it is to watch. So, give Ready Player One a shot; it might not be for you, but I firmly believe that it’s worth that risk for an undeniably fun ride. West Side Story (2021) When I wrote about the original West Side Story back in April, I expressed my disappointment with the film despite my admiration for many movie musicals (including classic ones such as Grease and The Sound of Music). Yet I was hopeful going into Spielberg’s remake of the 1961 film based on Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim’s 1957 Broadway production (which, in turn, is a retelling of William Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet”). Primarily, I wanted to see how Spielberg (with a screenplay by Munich and Lincoln writer Tony Kushner) brought his modern sensibilities soaked in his signature warmth and sentimentality to this story set 70 years in the past yet purporting to be timeless. Unfortunately, I did not find what I was looking for in Spielberg’s take on West Side Story. To begin with the positives, however, this film is a near-technical masterpiece in almost every regard. One of the most noticeable highlights from a filmmaking standpoint was the cinematography by Polish native and frequent Spielberg collaborator Janusz Kamiński (Schindler’s List, Saving Private Ryan, Lincoln). Simply put, Spielberg and Kamiński clearly approached this film with the “every frame a painting” mindset for virtually every shot (particularly how Kamiński uses one-shots and aerial shots to capture the slums of 1950s New York and the communities living therein). This aesthetic, however, shined most perhaps during the large dance numbers which inject so much life and energy in between the more character-driven, dramatic scenes. If nothing else, Spielberg’s West Side Story is worth seeing on the big screen for how it looks on the big screen. Furthermore, virtually every single main and supporting actor and actress brings everything they have to this production. They fully committed to the “song-and-dance” nature of this kind of musical and proved just what triple threats they (mostly) all are. No single actor fails at what they are setting out to do or what they are tasked with, but I thoroughly enjoyed Rachel Zegler as Maria and Mike Faist as Riff. I also appreciated Rita Moreno, who played Anita in the original movie, coming back in a small yet effective role that also gave us by far the funniest line of the runtime. However, it is Broadway alumnus Ariana DeBose (Motown: The Musical, Hamilton) taking over the role of Anita. Not only did I come to further appreciate Anita’s role in the story as an optimistic immigrant whose tragic loss of her love Bernardo (David Alvarez) contorts her desire for peace between the Jets and Sharks into a bittersweet yet justified hatred of Tony (Ansel Elgort) and all that she once stood for. Also, her singing, dancing, and acting in the numbers “America” and “A Boy Like That/I Have a Love” made Spielberg’s West Side Story worth the money I paid for my ticket in the theater. At this point, you may be thinking that I loved (or at least really liked) Spielberg’s take on this Broadway classic. But you’d be wrong, which sucks because I do love many of Spielberg’s films and wanted to really like this one. However, its big drawback was both Spielberg’s and the writer Tony Kushner’s approach to “modernizing” the original story of Tony and Maria’s “love at first sight” and the tragic fallout of that. I put “modernize” in quotes because (in my humble opinion) they really didn’t. Without delving into the specifics of Shakespeare’s approach to storytelling, I think the reason that “Romeo and Juliet” worked when it did was because of its embrace of an over-the-top, melodramatic love story in the context of a royal blood feud. Due to a modern audience’s inability to truly comprehend what that means on an interpersonal and intimately social level, this is fine both on the page and the stage. But in the case of both this film and the original West Side Story, putting this story within the framework of two rival gangs to explore race relations in the American city simply does not translate as well as Bernstein and Sondheim may have thought that it did. I greatly believed in Spielberg’s talent and love of the original film to the point that I was half-convinced walking into the theater that he’d be able to correct the problematic nature of where Tony and Maria’s relationship goes in the third act. But I was wrong; for some reason unbeknownst to me, they retained the plot structure wherein Anita decides to sleep with Tony AFTER she finds out that he murdered her brother Bernardo. This is no complaint of Zegler’s performance, but I simply can no longer be on Maria’s side (nor the writer’s) once this happens. For this absurdly bizarre story point turns West Side Story from a charming teen romance with some racial drama mixed in to a ridiculous melodrama that lacks the grounded emotional realism needed to pull off the gut-punch moments of the third act. While this may seem too harsh on a film that has so much good going for it, I’m a moviegoer who cannot fully sign off on a movie if the story lacks internal logic or the characters spur my loss of suspension of disbelief in their actions and motivations. And with both the original West Side Story and Spielberg’s take, this rings true. Maybe it’s a hot take, but this film does not even make it in my top fifteen Spielberg films (let alone my top ten). However, I still love so many of Spielberg’s movies and greatly admire his creative genius on the whole. Despite some occasional misses or the rare abomination of a movie (lookin’ at you, The Lost World!), Spielberg remains a powerhouse of the film industry and has more than earned his place in cinematic history with so many incredible movies that are worth seeing. With all that being said, here is the official ranking of my ten favorite Steven Spielberg films:
What is your favorite (or least favorite) Steven Spielberg movie? Which Spielberg movie that I didn’t talk about do you think deserves some praise? What opinions of mine do you find absolutely ridiculous? Let me know in the comments below. Until next time, this has been… Yours Truly, Amateur Analyst
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Austin McManusI have no academic or professional background in film production or criticism; I simply love watching and talking about movies. Archives
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