The good side of mediocre

Rating: 7/10 (26 June 2001)

In contrast to most people I found the quality even and unremarkable throughout. Would someone explain to me, for instance, what was so great about the plane crash? Yes, the moment when the cabin de-pressurises comes as a real jolt, but shock tactics are easy. It's like the moment in horror movies when a skeleton hand suddenly shoots up out of a grave. It's startling, not frightening. All in all the crash/storm sequence is humdrum and badly shot. What was the point of those intermittent blackouts? They're irritating; besides, Zemeckis has it backwards: a storm isn't light punctuated by darkness, it's darkness punctuated by light. If anything the plane crash was a low point.
That's the movie as a whole: decent but lacking, marred by poor craft throughout. Among the questionable decisions: computer generated whales (straight out of "Fantasia 2000"), FedEx (they could so easily have used a made up brand name), and too much editing on the island. The last really destroyed our sense of the passage of time, and with it any idea we may have had of how well the Tom Hanks character was faring. How long did he go before finding enough water to live on? I don't know, but I suspect it's longer than Zemeckis tried to lead us to believe, with his frequent cuts. All the small sequences before the `four years later' caption (itself a cop-out), good though they may have been individually, collectively come across as mere montage rather than a sustained assault on the problem of survival.
-On the other hand, what was so bad about the third act? "Cast Away" is at heart a gently optimistic story of survival: its message is that mere survival - MERE survival - isn't really so bad as all that when you get to know it. Some people wanted Tom Hanks to feel utterly bleak, to fall to pieces, when confronted with civilisation again. Why would he? Living in a city again after four years would be like re-adopting a half-forgotten habit - riding a bicycle for the first time in a decade. The truth is, there's nothing much to say about what happens when he rejoins the larger world. I found the concluding section the most honest part of the film, if a little aimless.
All in all, not bad. I remember a reviewer writing that the Oscar Zemeckis won for "Forrest Gump" would destroy him as an artist. I remember thinking at the time: "Well, how could it not? He's just been rewarded for creating something terrible." And, it must be noted, "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" was Zemeckis's only masterpiece. But it was also an unrepeatable accident. The kind of zaniness it exemplifies so easily turns sour in his hands (as in "Death Becomes Her" or the entire Back to the Future trilogy); on the other hand, if he keeps plugging away in an attempt to create something grand, he may one day succeed.