Cast Away
Composite Score: 82.44
Starring: Tom Hanks, Helen Hunt, Paul Sanchez, Lari White, David Allen Brooks, Nick Searcy, Geoffrey Blake, and Wilson the Volleyball
Director: Robert Zemeckis
Writer: William Broyles, Jr.
Genres: Adventure, Drama, Romance
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for intense action sequences and some disturbing images
Box Office: $429.63 million worldwide
Why should you Watch This Film?
Cast Away is the 2000 film about a workaholic FedEx employee who survives a plane crash and lives for four years on a deserted island with only a volleyball for company. It features Tom Hanks in the leading role of Chuck Noland – a higher middle manager in the FedEx company, obsessed with timeliness and making his job work. Over the course of the film, the only things that motivate Chuck to stay alive on the island ends up being a picture of his girlfriend/fiancée that she gave him in a family watch, reminding him of a promise to “be back soon”, and an unopened FedEx package that washed up on shore with stylized angel wings painted on it. His struggles on the island and eventual return to civilization allow Hanks to put on one of his best performances, carrying the film to an iconic place among the pantheon of film.
Why shouldn’t you Watch This Film?
Cast Away is loooong. There’s a solid forty-five minutes of exposition before Chuck ends up on the island plus thirty minutes of wrap-up after he returns to civilization. The parts that people remember of this film take up less than half of it (and don’t get me wrong, Tom Hanks does a phenomenal job carrying a one-man show for an hour), and a lot of the extra feels drawn out for no good reason (other than Zemeckis wanting some cool camera work). At the end of the day, it ends up being a two-and-a-half-hour film that could probably have been condensed to an hour and forty-five.
Compounding Cast Away’s lengthy run-time is its inability to make a clear point. Though the character bits are really solid, the film’s overall message is unclear. Is it about love and its ability to get us through anything? Is it about how being a workaholic secretly prepares you to survive in the wild? Is it about our need to disconnect from the daily grind to truly appreciate what we have? I don’t really know. Probably it’s a little bit of all of this, but some of it comes out contradictory, and there are story beats that feel forced, which deliver messages that are not entirely clear. Specifically, the final scene of the film makes very little sense thematically and even less sense practically. I won’t spoil it too much, but basically, he brings a package to someone who sent it to thank them for it and ends up looking off hopefully into the distance after a brief encounter. It doesn’t make sense that he would return the package rather than delivering it, and then the last shot doesn’t really resolve anything or induce deep thought either – it’s a poorly executed third act.
So wait, why should you Watch This Film?
Tom Hanks and Wilson the Volleyball – that’s the answer. The film’s second act of a man struggling to survive on an island with only a few FedEx packages to work from is one of the best and most iconic survival films ever made, and that is thanks to Hanks’s acting and a little volleyball with a bloody handprint face on it. Tom Hanks’s physical transformation is the first shocking bit of “method” acting we get in the film as he goes from a dad-bod to nearly emaciated from the start of the film to the end. Physical bits aside, Hanks acting all alone with only a blank-faced volleyball to play off of is brilliant entertainment. Even though it should feel insane, Hanks makes Chuck’s conversations with Wilson feel and flow naturally as if he were instead conversing with Helen Hunt or Meg Ryan or Tim Allen. He looks crazy, but he feels genuine, and that is a testament to Hanks’s acting, which did receive an Oscar nomination but lost out to Russell Crowe for Gladiator. (Seriously though, if we can give Leonardo DiCaprio an Oscar for whatever he did in The Revenant over Michael Fassbender in Steve Jobs, I don’t understand why Tom Hanks didn’t win for this, aside from his two other wins in the decade prior.)
The iconic second act of Cast Away, carried by Tom Hanks and his interactions with a volleyball, has made the film into one of the most memorable and Greatest Films of All Time. An overlong first act and weakly executed third act may leave the audience somewhat disappointed, but fans of Tom Hanks who want to hear him yelling at a different toy will certainly leave this one satisfied. This film is currently available to stream on Hulu if you are interested in checking it out.
