Cast Away Rating: Sorry, this product is not currently available. Cast: Tom Hanks Helen Hunt Peter Berg David Allen Brooks Complete Cast (5 total)

Cast Away Reviews

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Man Out Of Time
It's hard to think of a movie in which the hero ponders a metaphorical crossroads in his life while standing at a literal crossroads. Insipid or inspired? The problem with Robert Zemeckis's visually and viscerally eye-punching Robinson Crusoe ins that you can't say for sure. Could the movie really be as thematically trite as an insprirational office poster? Or is it an admirably stripped- down examination of the ancestral essence of being human?
Chuck Noland (Tom Hanks) doesn't worry about such big questions. He's airlifted into Moscow and other emerging capital hot-spots when local operations are absolutely, positivly running from that tireless hunter: time. (It's alerrgorical! Get it?) Summoned on Christmas to make an emergency run, Chuck leaves his fiencee Kelly (Helen Hunt) with the promise that he'll return New Year's Eve. Cue from a "Perfect Storm": Chuck and the FedEx jet crew lose radio contact and crash into the Pacific Ocean in a truly harrowing, you-are-there disaster sequence. This is no film for the squeamish, particularly after Chuck and a few FedEx packages wash up on an unnamed, utterly uninhabited island (Fiji's Monukiri and Mana, actually).
Almost everything, from what Chuck's forced to eat to his horror at consequences of a desert-island toothache, is accompanied by all the blood and guts left over from SAVING PRIVATE RYAN.
Add in Chuck's deteriorating hold on sanity---evinced by the inspired conceit of his relationship with a volleyball on which he has drawn a face---and you have a long middle section of bravura filmaking.
But once Chuck get home, the film turns anticlimatic and emotionally nil, and there's a startling lack of chemistry between Hanks and an unimpressive Hunt.

Tom Hanks Does It Again
This movie hammers home the idea, to me at least, that Tom Hanks deserves the Oscar. His acting ability amazes me.

This film harkens back to one of Tom's older films Joe Versus the Volcano, as the main character ends up on a deserted island. In this film, it's because of a plane crash in the pacific. The similarities between Cast Away and JVTV were numerous, with lots of bits of symbolism all through the film.

Chuck Noland (Hanks) is a Fed-Ex employee who is obsessed with time. Everything has to be done on time (the Fed-Ex motto). When things go wrong in the biz, they call him in. When he gets called away right before Christmas, he figures it's just a short trip. A few hours later, he's in the drink.

Trying to survive on the island only one concern. The other is keeping his sanity, which is apparently in short supply. Hanks delivers one of the best performances of his career in this film, which hardly got a second glance by critics.

While there are a few special effects in the film (the plane crash), the film is mostly centered on Hanks character and follows him while he tries to make some resemblence of a life on the island. Where's Gilligan, the Skipper and the professor when you need them?

Any Hanks fan should own this one. This is the one he got robbed of the Oscar on. You can repeat this mantra everytime you watch it. It's a slow constant flow-of-a-film, and is very dramatic and wonderful. I would have liked more special features, so I didn't give it 5 stars.

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