Cast Away Movie Critique

Cast Away was a very interesting survival experience. Put a man that runs his life by time and lives a controlled and planned life to the second and put him on a remote, lifeless island which causes him to live his life completely opposite from the way he would if he were home. It was man vs. nature as Chuck Noland (played by Tom Hanks) on an island alone for the majority of the movie. Chuck Noland is a Fed-Ex systems engineer. The night after proposing to his girlfriend Kelly (played by Helen Hunt), he gets on a plane that is carrying a cargo that he is escorting.

How ironic is it that he told Kelly that he would be right back and then ends up taking an extreme nosedive in the ocean. Luckily, Noland washes up on the shore of a remote island. For the next four years of his life, he is on the island alone with his only friend being a bloody volleyball he names “Wilson”. Then one day, a wall of a portapotty washes up on shore, and he is able to use it to make some sort of raft to hopefully get him home or at least far enough to be noticed and venture the roaring sea once again.

After much physical stress and the loss of his best friend Wilson, he is saved by a passing boat, and is returned home as somewhat of a hero and viewed as the pinnacle of strength and survival. Only thing is that the only thing that pushed him to survive for four years is now married with children putting both Kelly and Chuck in a very awkward position. Chuck Noland kept his sanity with his repeated conversations with “Wilson, the bloody volleyball”. Before then he seemed to be going insane without having someone to speak to and attempted to kill himself.

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There was one major flaw, in my opinion, in this film. The movie skips ahead four years at one point without any explanation of what happens during that long p of time. I understand four years is a lot of time to cover but a little explanation of key moments would’ve done the movie better. Maybe, they should’ve showed the development of his survival skills and new-found instincts. Also Kelly in the beginning didn’t seem to be as important and have much of an impact on his life but I would just mark this as a case of “not knowing what you have until you don’t have it anymore”.

Cast Away was an amazing film with a phenomenal actor who was entrusted with an entire movie (or at least most of it) on his shoulders. The transition to the island was depicted as a hard one as Chuck Noland celebrated the feat of making fire on the island, something we take for granted every day as we turn on our stoves without a thought of ever losing it. Noland represents the average man who is placed in an unfortunate situation but is able to make the best of it and eventually solve his major, life changing problem. I felt Hanks did a flawless job of depicting the life of a business man gone wrong.

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