Watchable, yet incredibly flawed

Rating: Null/10 (10 January 2001)

First off, I will agree with anyone who says the performance by Tom Hanks (And most any other actor or actress in this movie) was quite astounding. However, I feel this movie's problems are "What Lies Beneath" (To steal the title from Zemeckis' other film this year). Usually, I am the last person to say a movie is "boring"; oftentimes, my favorite movies are those with a 3-hour+ running time. At times, however, this movie, to be blunt, is BORING. The reason for this is because all the island scenes are strung together one after another; if the movie were to show one or two island scenes and then a scene of what was going on back home (Say, his friends' and families' reactions to the crash or his funeral), and so on, the pacing wouldn't have suffered so greatly. Second, on this island he has food, water, shelter, and so on. So why is he unhappy? Easy - No human contact. This is where Wilson the volleyball's role was so pivotal. Yet everyone in the auditorium, including myself, could not stop laughing. The movie failed on all counts to show Mr. Hanks' character's grief. I kept drawing parallels between the last 45 minutes of this film and David Croenberg's "The Dead Zone". Both feature a character who has been removed from society for a number of years and then is thrown back in, only to find that everything has changed. The movie could've succeeded here. It could've shown in detail what had changed, it could've further allowed Tom Hanks and Helen Hunt to show off their acting chops, it could've shown how the characters dealt with these changes, it could've been a better movie. In 1998's "The Thin Red Line", Terrence Malick proved to be quite a visionary director by showing silence and serenity and how it can get to a person. This probably would've made him the better director for "Cast Away". Alas, we'll never know. All in all, this isn't a bad movie so much as it is a disappointment. It's nice that Tom Hanks and Robert Zemeckis can make exceptionally good movies; it's just a shame this isn't one of them. ***