a very strong performance in a very strong film

Rating: 10/10 (14 December 2008)

The idea of a drama about a lone person being stranded on an island has always fascinated me as a moviegoer. In real life, there have been many castaways such as the Scottish sailor Alexander Selkirk, who spent half a decade alone on a tiny island off the coast of South America when he was confident that his ship, under deplorable conditions, would not make it back to port. Selkirk was probably the basis for this movie Cast Away. No, it's not a true story, but it's manufactured so well that if somebody was to tell you that it was based on an autobiography, you would probably believe it.
Cast Away stars Tom Hanks as Chuck Noland, a busybody FedEx executive who's "all about time", who soon discovers he has all the time in the world when his plane crashes into the ocean and he, alone, finds himself on a deserted island where he ekes on the barest living possible. He improvises his own shelter, tools, companions, and accepts the fact that help may never arrive and if it ever does, it may be too late for him.
This is an exceedingly wonderful movie. Not only is Tom Hanks the quintessential choice to play a castaway, but he does his performance so well that you quickly forget that you're spending most of your time looking at a superstar instead of a character. And you have to admire Hanks for his nerve to play such a character. When he first arrives on the island, Hanks is a tad bit obese, cleanly-shave, and perhaps a bit unsightly. When we effectively cut to a scene that takes place four years after his marooning on the island, he's a gaunt, scrawny survivalist with shrunken muscles, exposed ribs, and a hardly recognizable face through all of the beard and overgrown hair. In order to achieve this, production was shut down on the film for a whole year so that Hanks could lose a tremendous amount of weight and fit the description mentioned in the script. Now you have to admire an actor for such an undertaking.
Cast Away was nominated for two Academy Awards after its release at the dawn of the century. One was for Hanks himself, the other was for the sound design and the sound, next to Hanks, is the most important element in the movie. The film clocks at two and a half hours in length and it's not until about seventy-five percent of the way through that we even so much as hear a click of music. The soundtrack is taken up by amplified sounds that heighten the feeling of a lonely place. The crashing of the waves, the howl of the wind, the grinding of wood against wood as Tom Hanks vainly tries to build a fire, the list goes on. Without such incredible sound design, I don't think the island scenes of Cast Away would have been half as effective. And it's because of these two important elements that the movie stays interesting rather than bogging down as one might expect. I mean, after all, you're spending a long time just watching a lone man struggle to survive on an island. And it's not like he's doing anything incredible like wrestling with savage beasts or running from cannibals or anything like that. Just an average, everyday man just worrying about whether or not he's going to live long enough to see home again.
Before I conclude my review, I want to give just one warning. It has nothing to do with the film itself, it has to do with the advertisements. I saw the movie before I saw the trailers or the ads. And good thing I did, because I soon found out that the ads spoiled the movie from beginning to end in just a few minutes, ruining any feeling of question or the height of our expectations and thus, spoiling the integrity of the film. In short, see the movie, then watch the trailers if you want. As for the film itself, it gets an enormous amount of recommendation from me.