Desert Island Discs

Chuck Noland (Tom Hanks) works for FedEx as a systems engineer, travelling the world at a moments notice, sorting out the companies distribution problems. His life is ruled by the clock, as he always has to be going somewhere to meet the company's deadlines, leaving his poor girlfriend behind. Chuck's hectic life soon comes to an abrupt halt when a FedEx cargo plane that he is travelling on crashes at sea, leaving him washed up on an uninhabited island in the middle of nowhere. With only the clothes he is wearing, and a few washed up packages from the crash, he has to learn how to survive. After 4 years of being stranded on the island, fate offers him an opportunity to return to civilization.

The star of Cast Away is Tom Hanks (Philadelphia) who puts in a virtuoso performance as Chuck Noland, the man stranded on the remote island. Hanks lost an amazing fifty pounds during the filming of Cast Away to make his appearance after 4 years more realistic. The film really demonstrates what a talented actor Hanks is as he convincingly demonstrates feelings such as despair, anger, pain to name just a few. As he goes on his journey of survival we see some very powerful yet simple scenes, such as when he creates fire for the first time, or when he has to deal with a nasty dental problem (ouch). The next most important character in the film is Wilson, a volley ball. Okay, so a volley ball is not an actor, but Wilson is such an important part of the film, as Chuck turns the ball into a face and turns him into a character who he talks too. Wilson actually takes on the character of Chuck's conscience as shown in the lines from Chuck:

Interestingly, they actually wrote dialogue for Wilson which was spoken by a crew member to assist Hanks in creating a realistic conversation with the ball.

The film is directed by Robert Zemeckis who also worked with Hanks on Forrest Gump. It seems to me that when these two get together they manage to pull out a bit of magic from each other. Although Zemeckis has created a very choppy movie, this actually helps as it stops it from being to drawn out and ultimately boring. The film is actually set over 4 years, so it had to be created in the choppy manner so that it showed the important bits from each year, rather than concentrating on just one part of it. Another amazing fact is that for the duration of the film whilst Nolan is stranded on the island, there is no soundtrack, you don't notice this to start with.

Tom Hanks .... Chuck Noland
Wilson the Volleyball .... Itself
Nick Searcy .... Stan
Helen Hunt .... Kelly Frears

First one is the making of feature which is always useful as it does explain everything through behind the scene footage and interviews with the cast and crew.

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Conclusion & Rating
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