Cast Away

Schmaltz 8
Violence 4
Romance 7
Nudity and Sex 1
Plot 7
Buckets o' Blood 2
Terror 2

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Movie information


Synopsis: Summary: Tom Hanks storms the beaches once again, though this time Private Ryan is nowhere to be found. Instead, he's a Mild-Mannered... better make that Obsessive-Compulsive Fed Ex worker who wants to make sure that all of his packages reach the World on Time. Chuck Noland is engaged to Kelly Frears, and though the two of them live via day-planners, they seem terribly happy with their existence together. In fact, even their potential in-laws seem like decent enough fellows. Life, as they say, is good.

Which, as any movie-goer knows, is the cue for Kooky Kaos to strike! Yes, en route to somewhere Chuck's plane goes off-course and goes down into the deep, dark, storm-tossed sea! He washes up on a deserted island, where he seems doomed to live out the rest of his life...

Here at Frobozz Magic Productions, we believe in only the highest quality of reviews, and to that end we take a pledge to YOU the reader... that there will be NO Gilligan jokes from this point to the end of the review. Yes, this is our pledge and we stand behind it 99.44%.

At any rate, after cobbling together a telephone out of coconuts... wait, darn it, I did it already. Well, that extra .66% gives us a little bit of wiggle room. Since the previews ain't makin' a surprise out of this I won't either: Hanks does what Certain People Not To Be Joked About never could and gets off of his island prison, becoming (as Charles Dickens had put it once in A Tale of Two Cities) Recalled to Life. The real meat of the movie begins here, as Chuck must learn what it means to be alive again in modern society.


Commentary: When I leave a really powerful film, I tend to wander around outside of the movie theatre in a daze... largely because a part of me is still existing within the world shown on the silver screen, not yet ready to leave. This is when I run the greatest risk of being hit by an oncoming car in the parking lot. Cast Away left me dazed and reeling for a long, long time after the final credit rolled; I'm not quite sure how I drove home. The movie is something for which I've waited a long time: a film about isolation and loneliness that does truly understand how to turn the silence which almost must prevail in a one-man show into cinematic gold. There's something magical about this film; Hanks is clearly the correct choice to play Chuck. His emotion and projection of self is absolutely convincing and he just demands your attention with the Awesome Powers of Presence that he's somehow managed to win from the Devil (probably by trading his career on Bosom Buddies to Lucifer; a dark trade indeed). The movie makes use of very short scenes in strategic places to move forward the plot without overwhelming the viewer with details -- which was a brilliant move, as this movie's already weighing in fairly heftily time-wise, and every scene here feels really necessary. There are one or two scenes that are cut a few seconds too short, so I'm curious to see if any footage will be restored when the inevitable DVD is released.

If I have any complaint, it would be that Hanks' return to civilization is far too short, and yet keeping it truncated was the correct decision. The movie-makers managed to touch on every emotional loose end in the time allotted without tying them all up into a neat little package of resolution. And that's my final point: this movie feels real. The people in it behave like real people rather than the usual cinema stereotypes who populate our little cinemaverse. When Chuck returns from the dead, not everything can go back to how it was. Some people have had to have moved on and this breeds confusion. But there's no magic back door, no feeling of love conquering all problems in a way that feels as though the world is predestined to be happy, and sadness is really an aberrant condition that simply should not be felt by anyone who isn't a Really Bad Person.

Don't take the last as saying the film ends sadly. The ending is poignant, but the theme of the entire movie is carried through even to the end. What is that theme, I hear you ask? To borrow a tag line from the less-than-stellar Deep Impact, it is simply this: hope survives.


Moments to Watch For



Recommended: List it as a movie you'd take with you to a deserted island.

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