Cast Away, directed by Robert Zemeckis (What Lies Beneath, Forrest Gump), takes the viewer alongside its protagonist to witness a dramatic physical, psychological and emotional transformation

Rating: 9/10 (6 July 2001)

A FedEx systems engineer, Chuck Noland (Tom Hanks) has efficiently built his life around the clock. Driven by his commitment toward punctuality, Chuck succeeds in maintaining his company's reputability, often putting on hold his love life with Kelly (Helen Hunt: Pay It Forward). Chuck's priority is reaffirmed when he decidedly interrupts a Christmas Eve dinner, as he is unexpectedly summoned to attend to an important business duty overseas. Chuck's life takes a dramatic turn that night, when his airplane crashes into the sea. Managing to surface from the sea unharmed, Chuck reaches an isolated island. Alone and away from civilization, Chuck is forced to test his adaptability skills, find the drive to survive, and rediscover the timeless qualities of life.
Cast Away relies on location --the extreme nature of its settings, such as the hostile sea and an isolated island-- to create a story that focuses on the mental and physical processes of its protagonist as he confronts physical isolation. Due to the simplicity of its premise (a man who is stranded in an island must learn to adapt in order to survive), Cast Away finds its meaning in the mechanics of its character's adaptability. Specifically, Cast Away focuses on the step-by-step survival, which mostly involves securing food, seeking shelter and making a fire. The camera seldom pulls away to objectify a scene, follows its subject's evolution closely, and resists cutting to scenes outside of the protagonist's new world. (Once the character has reached the island, the only images reminding the viewer of civilization are the objects inside a few FedEx packages that float onto the shore.) In this manner, Cast Away establishes an intimate relationship between its protagonist and the viewer. Cast Away uses an extended ellipsis of time to dramatize the character's transformation, demonstrating that by taming Nature he has learned to satisfy his needs, and that by obeying his imagination he has managed to protect his sanity. In this sense, Cast Away offers an intriguing commentary on modern man's ability to return to his primitive origins. The film's realism is enhanced by the use of natural sounds, which are only replaced by external music one hour and a half into the film.
Aside from these strengths, Cast Away suffers from mawkish sentimentality in those scenes that attempt to moralize its character. In one scene, Chuck finds a card inside a FedEx package, which reads: "The most beautiful thing in the world is the world itself." In a later scene, when Chuck realizes he must calculate the rhythm of the rise and fall of the tide in order to safely sail away, he is reminded of his company's motto: "Let's not commit the sin of turning our back on Time." These advisory proclamations disrupt the more effectively established non-communication between two detached worlds. In spite of this, the film's additional exploration (toward the end) of society's readiness to cast away its absent member, adds poignancy to the overall drama. Due to Hanks' accurate performance and his physique's notable transformation, Cast Away may be seen as a film that carefully constructs its story around character: its most exploited asset.