Movie Reviews

Cast Away

"Cast Away" is a 2000 dramatic adventure movie directed by Robert Zemeckis and starring Tom Hanks as Chuck Noland. This movie lasts 2h23 and takes place between 1995 and 2000.
Ultimately, the story is that of a man who gets stuck on an island. But there are many elements at the beginning and at the end of the movie that come into play.
The first scene is pretty cool: we see a FedEx truck on the road, taking a package from a woman's hands. For an instant, we see the POV of the package, which is surely interesting. The package arrives in Russia, where we discover the main character and basically what he does: Chuck Noland, a higher level employee of FedEx. Then, we meet his wife, his family over Christmas dinner, their plans of a wedding. In my opinion, this section is a bit too long, but it is defendable because it sets up all that Chuck has to lose. Because of their jobs, he and his wife don't see each other often. Anyways, Chuck hops on a FedEx plane for work and unfortunately suffers a crash. This scene is very intense, shot from the inside of the cabin. He washes on an unknown shore and that's where the main story begins. He spends a lot of time trying to figure out how to survive on the island. It's all trial and error really, as he tries to find the best way to open a coconut, to make fire, to setup camp, to find things to eat… Surprisingly enough, this island doesn't present many threats in itself: there are no big animals, venomous spiders or whatnot… no, just Chuck having to fight thirst, hunger, and loneliness. About that, he spends most of his time on the island silent (when other castaways in movies tend to mutter or panic "alright, what am I doing, I need to find a way to contact home" etc). That is, until he opens one of the packages that washed up on the island after him, and finds a volleyball, which ends up becoming his friend. In retrospect, as crazy as he may seem, Wilson (the volleyball friend) is probably the only thing that kept him sane throughout this whole ordeal. Once the audience sees him figure out most things he needs to survive, the movie surprisingly has a "four years later" ellipse, and we meet Chuck again. He has pretty much completely acclimated to his hermit life: he has invented many contraptions that improve his life, such as a sun trail that reveals what time of the year it is. He has gained much knowledge as well, noticing calmer tides in March. This is what motivates him, when he finds a piece of scrap metal marked with a place in California, to build a raft and try to escape. We see then also how much he has learnt: he knows how to make rope, and by that I mean what trees are easy to make rope out of, how much rope he will need to make the raft, and how much rope he can make out of the trees on his island. When he finally manages to leave the island, he still looks back at it with nostalgia. That's true, when we think about it, he has been living here for 4 years and been through the most growth in his life and now he leaves this place! During a storm, his raft gets broken, and he loses Wilson at sea (he almost gave up on his raft to get him back!). At this point, he gives up and drifts away. He only wakes up as a merchandise ship picks him up. He comes back home and there, he's sort of a hero, but doesn't care about all of that; what kept him alive all these years was the thought of seeing his fiancee again. However, she got married and had a child. He finally gets to meet her, and for some reason she falls back in love with him. However, they can't be together, and he leaves her house. There are also talks about administrative procedures to "be brought back to life". All of this is accurate, but is it really needed for the story? One thing from that section I really liked though is that, without expressing it with words, Chuck realizes how easily humans have access to everything in the modern world (light, running water, the comfort of a bed…) and he also mocks some things that mattered to him before but are so below him now, such as the fat percentage of the milk in his coffee (his fiancee apologized about not having the right milk when he visited). At the end, we see Chuck driving on the same road as the FedEx truck from the beginning, and he delivers the only package that washed up on his island but that he never opened. That's basically where the movie ends. The survival aspect was so interesting, but the beginning and the end felt like too much to me? They do make sense, but they just feel too heavy on the plotline.
By the way, this film contains a fair amount of blood from wounds that Chuck sustains on the island. Really, there was a whole lot of blood in this movie. Probably a bit too much.
The filmography in this movie is pretty classic. There is a visual parallel at one point, between the pan around when Chuck is in Moscow at the beginning of the film, and when he wakes up on the island. There are many shots of the sea and the beach to show his loneliness. On negative filmography aspects, I noticed a lot of continuity errors from a shot to another in the color of the sea and the time of day, which is pretty enormous and unusual. In addition, night scenes are very, very dark, which is believable, but not necessarily so nice to watch in a movie.
An interesting non-story element though is that in addition to Chuck not talking a lot, there isn't much music in this movie. So when he drifts away on the raft and dramatic music starts, it really feels like a strong moment.
As well, there is one really deep thought that Chuck shares: after three years on the island, he wanted to kill himself. He wanted to make sure he would succeed, so he threw a weighted doll first instead of him, and, seeing how that failed, gave up on that thought. He recalls to his colleague that he felt he couldn't even control his death, so the only thing he could control in the end was to stay alive. Pretty interesting message here.