Engrossing story with good psychological depth

Rating: 8/10 (10 February 2002)

(Note: Over 500 of my movie reviews are now available in my book "Cut to the Chaise Lounge or I Can't Believe I Swallowed the Remote!" Get it at Amazon.)
***SPOILERS*** ***SPOILERS*** The theme of the cast away goes back long before Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe (1660-1731) or The Swiss Family Robinson by Johann Wyss (1781-1830); indeed it probably goes back to a time when people first set out on the open sea in boats. It is a wonderfully romantic genre, employing the classic "man versus nature" theme while allowing us to indulge in the fantasy of escape from the confines and restrictions of civilization.
Here we have Tom Hanks as Chuck Nolan, a Fed Ex executive whose plane ditches into the South Pacific ocean. He washes up on a tiny, desert island as the sole survivor of the plane crash. (Incidentally, both "des-ert island" and "de-serted island" are correct, the words "des-ert' and "de-serted" in this context meaning the same thing.) His four-year stay on the island forms the bulk of the movie, but perhaps the most engaging part for most movie-goers is what happens afterwards.
Tom Hanks was excellent throughout, as usual, and the direction by Robert Zemeckis from a script by William Broyles Jr. was compelling. Especially good was the irony about what happens to Chuck's beloved (Helen Hunt) while he is gone. This has been done before (but I forget where), and is the kind of heart-wrenching development that could have been pure saccharin but instead came across as thought-provoking, veracious and very affecting.
Zemeckis also directed the excellent film, Contact (1997), made from the novel by Carl Sagan. We can see here (and there) that Zemeckis's work owes a lot to the influence of Steven Spielberg in both a positive and a negative sense. Zemeckis, like Spielberg, can be cloying at times in his effort to secure the audience's identification. We can see this in the beginning with Chuck cutely trying to sell efficiency to the Russians with the help of a little boy. But splendid was the plane crash sequence, the kind of thing Spielberg would want to be intensely vivid, and it was. And later the startling sight of the huge cargo ship, like a sea-going skyscraper, recalled to mind the first shot of the spaceship from Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). The Fed Ex packages flying out all over the world engendering a kind of corporate "we're all one world" feeling like something from a Coca-Cola commercial was pure Spielberg.
But what I like to do when I look at a movie like this is to lean forward and scrutinize it for authenticity. Did the cast away lose weight? Yes, as a matter of fact, Tom Hanks must have dropped about ten pounds, or perhaps he fattened up for the first part of the film (or was that body cosmetology?) and then fasted for the scenes showing him four years later. But did he lose enough weight? For those who have been watching TV's "Survivor," we know he didn't. And was he tan enough? His hair was little lighter after his ordeal, but he really needed to be baked a dark brown, which he wasn't.
I also look at how he ate. What was his source of vitamin C? Do coconuts contain Vitamin C? I don't know. But showing him eating seaweed, which does contain vitamin C, would have worked. Using the coconuts to hold water was a nice touch. Learning to spear fish with a wooden spear is plausible, but spearing a fish with a wooden spear in the open ocean is unlikely. Notice there were no birds or bird eggs or bird guano on the island. An uninhabited island in the middle of the ocean is always a nesting place for birds.
This last observation reveals that the setting was not in fact a tiny island but part of a larger body of land. Notice there was no clear, encircling shot of the island (as from the air). In fact we never see the other side of the island.
It was interesting to see how he got the fire going (again "Survivor" fans--and boy scouts--know how hard that is to do), but I was thinking that maybe he could have used the glass on the watch face or from the flashlight as a way to concentrate sunlight to make a fire.
I also watched to see whether he did what I would have done. Of course what I would have done doesn't mean that much, but I would not have left the island for the open ocean (which seemed almost suicidal), unless there was out there on that ocean a ship's corridor, so to speak, which is possible. Of course, who can say what a man might do after being four years entirely alone on a tiny island? I also would not have tried to cure my toothache, regardless of how bad it hurt, by breaking the tooth off with the ice skates. After all, that might make things worse. Trying to pull the tooth would have been my strategy--but how?
I liked the irony of finding the ice skates in a washed up Fed Ex package, and then Chuck's use of the blades as mirror and knife. I know why he didn't take the dead man's clothes, but I think he should have plugged his nose and peeled them off anyway. The washed up metal "sail" was a nice inspiration, and there were many others: the "discovery" of tool-making by striking the vocanic rock at the right angle; burning the base of the trees to make wood for the raft; the petroglyphs he made in the cave; sleeping on the floor in the hotel room, etc.
Best no comment scene: Chuck looking at the Alaskan king crab legs at the buffet.