User Reviews

From time to time a group of people with a lot of guts come forward and challenge something, that every average thinking producer would get nightmares to even think about making it.

Fear of failing must come to mind, if the setting says:

• only one actor for 80 min (and one dead body)

• 40 min of it basically limited to: "Hello,.. What's that?.. Albert Miller,.. Over here,.."

• no BGM

• no adrenaline injections with savages, sharks, snakes etc.

• just plain "Life is hard enough as it is."

I loved it for:

• the guts of making it

• the heartbreaking and real-to-life love story

• Tom Hanks' performance

• his companion Wilson

great movie / must see

I've always been intrigued with Daniel Defoe's "Robinson Crusoe", particularly the importance of the items that Crusoe salvaged from the shipwreck, items that Crusoe could not have made himself and which make his survival and the relative elegance of the life he built for himself quite plausible. The real-life inspiration for Crusoe was one Alexander Selkirk who, in 1704, choose to remain on one of the Juan Fernandez islands - four hundred miles from the Chilean coast - rather than continue on a voyage with a captain and on a ship he did not trust. Selkirk was left with bedding, a firelock rifle, some powder, bullets, tobacco, a hatchet, a knife, a kettle, a Bible, his mathematical instruments, and some books. Selkirk's four years on his own were a bit more austere than Crusoe's fictional life, in large measure because of his relatively meager stock of good quality tools. Selkirk also lost a lot of his social skills.

I was interested to see how Cast Away was going to solve the tool issues and how they would deal with a person living on his own for a long period of time. The solutions were simply marvelous: ice skates, volleyball, etc. Tom Hanks is superb in the role.

And as a bonus, the castaway's return home is a fascinating part of the story. The driveway scene between Hanks and Helen Hunt is very powerful and reminds me of the great Emma Thompson/Anthony Hopkins 'book' scene from "Remains of the Day". Highly recommended.

I liked this movie, but I can't say the same for the reviews found on this website. Far too many of these fall into 2 categories: Those who thought the movie was a Crusoe-like story of survival and loved it, and those who thought the film was an ad for Fedex and hated it. But the movie is neither about "man against nature" nor about Fedex.

Cast Away is about love - about the difficulty of finding it in a world obsessed with success, about the freakish accidents that can produce or destroy it, about an ordeal that led one man to re-think what is meaningful in life, and about the need to bring to the pursuit of love the same resourcefulness and courage that enabled the hero to survive on an island for 5 years.

Tom Hanks is superb as Chuck Noland - creating immense sympathy for an ordinary guy trapped - not against his will - in a job that is eating him alive. How many actors could have made Noland's attachment to "Wilson" believable? Yet Hanks does.

The last section of the film, much reviled by many, is immensely touching. Noland has survived 5 year's of utter isolation hoping to be reunited with his fiancé and has resigned himself to death at least a few times before he is miraculously rescued. Anyone who remains dry-eyed during his meeting with Kelly, when their rich feelings are both acknowledged and of necessity abandoned - is unworthy of being allowed in the theater to see a film of such quality as this one.

That Noland's hard-earned wisdom about love and family will not be wasted makes for a marvelous ending to the film. It has required all of his ingenuity and endurance to survive on the island. It will now require strength of a different kind to accept the irrevocable loss of Kelly and open himself to a new experience, perhaps with Bettina. The last scene, with Noland standing at the crossroads, as the haunting theme is reprised for the last time, as Bettina drives toward her house and as Hanks looks into the camera with new-found resolve - is classic - though again, cynics are absolutely barred from enjoying it.

I gave this movie a "2" only because Tom Hanks is superb. Otherwise, this film has no redeeming features as far as I'm concerned. It's one big yawn, and poorly written to boot.

One of the pivotal things that enables our hero to survive is that packages wash up with items he's able to use. Yet he deliberately leaves one package unopened and at the end delivers it. Aw, c'mon! We're talking life-and-death here! In the end he delivers the package to it's proper destination -- 'cuz that's what FedEx is all about, I guess.

The movie crawls along showing Hanks' adjustment to the island. Some time passes -- we see he's started a beard, but his hair hasn't grown too much -- maybe two weeks? Then, bam! four years have passed. Now the first thing that crossed my mind when it was announced that he'd been there four years was, "Why hasn't he committed suicide?" Well, it crossed his mind, too and we hear him tell about it -- twice. But we don't see it! This crucial scene occurs off-camera! Bad story-telling. I'm not saying that we needed scenes of every day on the island, but some showing his adjustment and time passing would have been appropriate and made a smoother transition into the escape sequence.

My only major beef I had with this movie was the way it was marketed. Thanks to the trailers and previews to the film, we knew that Chuck Noland would in fact be rescued from the island. However, even with that said, the previews didn't really spoil the movie. Though it would have made the message(s) that much more powerful if they didn't give that much of it away. Tom Hanks is Chuck Noland; A FedEx efficiency engineer who flies around the world at a moments notice to troubleshoot whatever problems the company is having at any given place. Helen Hunt plays his loving girlfriend / fiancé, Kelly, who is very understanding of Chuck Noland's plight. One day, just before Christmas, Chuck is called away to Malaysia. This is when Chuck Noland's life takes a sudden and dramatic turn as his plane (most realistically) crashes into the ocean. As the only survivor, he washes up on shore of a small, isolated island in the south Pacific. This is a film that really forces the viewer to relate to the main character. On the surface, Chuck is not a guy most people would relate to; He has a high paying job which he actually seems to enjoy on some level, and a girlfriend he is completely in love with. His life is as good as it can get up until the tragic plane crash. Now his life is turned upside down as he struggles to find the basic needs of survival. There are no cuts to the rescue efforts, no "meanwhile, back in Memphis" scenes. It's all Chuck on the island for the second act of the film. There are four basic needs of survival. Most people know about the first three: Food, Water and Shelter. Chuck realizes that companionship is really the fourth need, which he finds in the form of a vollyball he calls "Wilson". The acquisition of food, water and shelter are all epic struggles for Chuck Noland as we see him try to break open coconuts with rocks and make fire to cook crabs. We suffer with him as he does his own dental work. This goes on for four years... Finally, one day a piece of metal (from the plane?) washes up on the island and it gives Chuck an idea of how to escape. He builds a raft out of Coconut trees and uses the piece of metal as a sail to escape from the island. He spends several days out on the ocean hoping to be rescued. Along the way, he losses his only friend of the last four years, Wilson, in a strange but very emotional scene. Shortly thereafter, on the brink of death from dehydration, he is rescued. In any other movie, this would be the happy ending. But this is not any other movie. Chuck finds that Kelly has moved on with her life. And now he must find a way to move on with his. When he first arrived on the island, he only needed to find ways to physically survive, but now rescued, he needed to find ways how to emotionally survive in a world that moved on without him. The final scene, just before the credits roll, reveals the most powerful moral I have ever seen in a movie. This is a film that proves that no matter how much suffering, pain, or tragedy that someone may go through, their life will always be worth living. And it does so without invoking religion or astrology or any other kind of pseudoscience. This is a moral and spiritual film that all people can relate to in some way or another.