A Modern "Robinson Crusoe" & "Enoch Arden" Story - Before "Lost"

Rating: 10/10 (4 July 2007)

Tom Hanks movie career has been one of the best things to emerge out of television acting in the last half century. He rarely if ever disappoints. CAST AWAY is one of his best performances - a tour-de-force one man show for most of the movies time on screen.
Hanks is Chuck Nolan, an executive official at FED EX, who seems to have everything going for him. He has a grueling but interesting and successful career in business, with many friends, and he is having a really hot and heavy romance with Kelly Frears (Helen Hunt), which is likely to end up in marriage. But he is sent on a business trip, like so many others, and the plane crashes in the Pacific Ocean. Although there were five men on the Fed Ex plane, only Hanks is lucky enough to get into a life raft with any supplies or provisions. Eventually he reaches a deserted island.
If you read the novel by Daniel DeFoe, Crusoe slowly builds upon his own knowledge of how to survive to make his island a fairly comfortable place to live on - despite the threats of cannibals. But DeFoe gave Crusoe one thing that Nolan does not get. DeFoe gives his survivor a companion: Friday. There is no loneliness on Crusoe's island. Nolan does not have such luck. He has to create even his companion: a volleyball with a painted face on it named "Wilson", whom he talks to when he is trying to do anything (and Nolan has to do everything, including rediscover fire).
It's a crushing situation, and leads to depression and some dark thoughts. But Nolan is one determined man - somehow he will get off that island, if for no other reason than that he wants to return to civilization, and best of all to Frears. It is the photograph of Frears that keeps Nolan's sanity together in that long, lonely vigil on the island.
So he finds a cave to live in in the island's rocks, to keep relatively warm and dry in the rain. He does rediscover fire. He does keep a fairly good track of time. He even performs (in one of the most grueling moments of the film) oral surgery on a painful tooth that you have to see to believe.
SPOILER AHEAD: He does get off the island in the end - but finds his problems just as difficult to solve off the island as it was on the island.