"Cast Away" Rated PG-13
***.5/*****
Cast Away, starring Tom Hanks, is a very original, very gutsy project. Tom Hanks dreamed up this story six years ago, and since then he has been waiting for it to be made. He has been waiting for a director to take the risk. He found his man in his friend, and Robert Zemeckis (the Academy Award winning director of Forrest Gump). The films is fairly good (especially on Hanks's part), but it wasn't worth a six year wait.
Tom Hanks plays Chuck Noland, a FedEx executive who is extremely devoted to getting packages sent on time. After working in Moscow, Noland goes back home to Memphis to see his girlfriend Kelly Frears (Helen Hunt) for Christmas, but is soon wisked away by his job again, to fly off to do more work. His plane crashes (in a breathtaking scene, I might add) and he is the sole survivor, washed up on the shore of an uninhabited desert island. From here, he starts doing various things to survive, like finding food, making fire and shelter, painting a face in his own blood on a volleyball that washed up on shore after the plane crash named Wilson, ect. Wilson is his only companion, who has conversations with to keep from being too lonely. He then comes up with an idea: he will try to sail the ocean hoping for a miracle rather than dying on the island.
All these scenes on the island are very good. It is truly incredible that Hanks can keep your interest with little dialog and no one else on screen. Hanks's performance (which was good enough to win him a Golden Globe nomination), is the most extraordinary part of the movie, and I would have liked it more if it had ended with his daring mission but...
Like they reveal in the commercial, Noland is rescued and brought back to normal life. The rest of the movie is very slow and arbitrary. It tries to be touching, but fails. Overall, Hanks's impeccable performance and Zemeckis's wonderful directing, but the story needed a little MORE work (even after six years) to maintain interest.
