Tom Hanks is all alone of a tiny South Pacific island

Rating: 9/10 (7 September 2016)

Chuck Noland is an executive with global delivery company FedEx and he is obsessed with punctuality that is until the plane he is travelling on goes down in the South Pacific during a storm. He is the sole survivor and when the storm is over his life raft has washed up on a small island. He quickly establishes that there are no other people around and it isn't much longer before he realises that there is no immediate likelihood of rescue as the plane was four hundred miles away from its designated flightpath due to the storm. All Chuck has to survive is his punctured raft, a few FedEx packages that washed ashore and the limited food on the island. He will learn how to exist in a far more primitive manner; lighting fires without matches, cracking coconuts and catching fish; he will also have to cope with no medical help when he injures himself. His only company on the island is 'Wilson' a volleyball that he has drawn a face on and increasingly talks to whether this is a sign of insanity or a method of preventing it is hard to say. The only other things keeping him going it the knowledge that he has a loving fiancée back in his hometown and one FedEx package that he didn't open and is determined to deliver one day.
For a film that is over two hours long surprisingly little happens once our protagonist has been marooned on his island; that does not mean it is boring though. This is almost entirely down to Tom Hanks' performance as Chuck as we don't see another living soul from the time of the crash till almost the end of the film. That is not to say that nothing happens and his location means that things that would merely be unpleasant become life threatening. Some of these events are fairly wince inducing such as the time he is cut on coral and the less said about how he deals with a bad tooth the better! Without going into too much detail the film's conclusion is suitably bittersweet. As previously stared Hanks is great; the camera is on him for almost the entire film and he makes us believe in his character even when he is having a conversation with a volleyball. The rest of the cast inevitably have much smaller roles but they are impressive enough too. Overall I'd certainly recommend this film to anybody who doesn't need none stop action.