Except for the part about returning an unopened package …
You’re stuck for four years on an island.
You have some useful stuff from a few packages that you opened,
(some of which was so useful it saved your frickin’ life)
So, naturally, you don’t look for some additional useful stuff, in the only other package you have?
Sorry, that’s not realistic.
Yes. That package was the last link to his Life. If he opened that last package his Life was over.
Exactly. It didn’t matter what was in it. He needed it for his sanity.
That’s really the most beautiful thing about the movie. Not that there was a solar powered GPS and sat phone inside, or that there wasn’t.
What was in the box was his very tenuous connection back to the real world, a hyperspacelink, as it were. A wormhole. To open the box would be to sever that connection, perhaps permanently. That box is his fingertip grip on the mental hope of ever getting home. To open the box is to give up.
I like parts of it very much, especially two scenes that I’ll describe below.
Can’t seem to find the spoiler-box option, so I’ll just add this warning:
**SPOILERS AHEAD
**Toward the beginning, there’s a scene in which he surprises his wife at her workplace while she’s using a photocopier. They embrace and start to sway in a slow dance that falls into synch with the rhythm of the photocopier.
The other scene takes place on the ill-fated flight. He’s in the bathroom and, with great concentration, starts to pull a bandage off of his finger. Just as it breaks free, the aircraft is ripped apart by an explosion.
There are other things about it that have more to do with what doesn’t happen. In at least a couple of scenes, he cuts himself on coral and the shots of blood swirling in the water seem to suggest that it might attract sharks. Similarly, I thought he was going to run into unfriendly company in that creepy cave. Maybe it’s just me, but I thought the film hinted at these things that never actually happened, and I like it when films do that.
That self-dental extraction though… yikes.
Don’t focus on the bit on the island. It takes up a lot of the running time, but the point of the film is in his return to civilization. To the world, he’s dead and buried, the love of his life has kids with another man. He’s been zeroed. He’s as alone at “home” as he was on the island.
The best scene, to me, is after the party. Food everywhere, and he chuckles at a cigarette lighter. What for years was a struggle against the elements, is once again fulfilled with overabundance. But still he is alone.
Yeah, the crossroads thing is a bit lazy, but overall the narrative works pretty well.
Huh? zeroed?
Sure, he had a tough 4 years. But now that he’s home, he gets a pretty good welcome.
He’s no worse off than anybody who has been dumped by a lover, or divorced and seen his wife have kids with another man.
The film is over-rated.
Couple of things unmentioned:
He’s going to be one of the biggest celebrities in the world if he wants to be. If he so chooses, there will be a massive book, a movie, National Geographic specials, movie cameos…
His buying a new ‘Wilson’ is a little…disturbing.
Oh, sorry. It’s an old sci-fi role playing game term I learned and still use. It means that in a high-tech world, you have no records of existing on the books or in any databases, etc. This could be from a hack to destroy the records, time or dimensional travel to a place you didn’t exist before, or coming from a low-tech portion of the world where records aren’t kept. You have no criminal record, but no credit and no resume.
In Chuck’s case, he was declared dead by the world. He now has no standing, no cache, and no obligations. He has a car and that’s about it. He got a warm reception, but notice how the narrative skips over the ceremonies and parties and shows Chuck mostly alone in the aftermaths of them.
He’s not home. He has no home. He has no life to come back to.
(For the record, I’m not some huge fan of the movie. It has many flaws, biggest of which are its slow pace and use of cliches. I do, however, find the question of what to do when you don’t exist to be an intriguing one.)
Also…no one has mentioned the plane crash? Horrific. I have no fear of flying myself but movie air crashes get to me for some reason. Odd , since the real ones on the “Mayday/Airline disasters” don’t. Other than to get me to yell at the screen, “Turn around now fools…what are you waiting on???”
That’s because the plane cash is the most unrealistic aspect of the movie. They needed a way to get him on the island with random packages, and never bothered to put any consideration into whether the scenario was legitimate.
Jets typically fly at an altitude of ~36,000 feet (11,000 meters). The whole point of this is that they can fly above weather, since t-storms typically top out at 30,000 feet of so.
Weather does play a significant role in plane crashes, and this is why the vast majority of crashes take place during take-offs or approaches – the only time during a flight when weather presents a danger is when you have to fly through it.
We’ve had two examples recently of jets going down in mid-fight, one shot from the air and the other due to causes as yet unknown, but weather was certainly not a factor. As a general rule, the only things that can take a plane down in mid-flight are 1. pilot error; 2. mechanical or electronic failure or; 3. people with nefarious motivations on the ground or in the plane.
Everything else in the movie, cliche or no, seemed more or less believable to me (except how he produced an analemma on the wall of his cave without a working mechanical or digital clock), but the plane crashing due to stormy weather has always bugged me…
But the plane didn’t crash due to stormy weather. The stormy weather was a plot device to get the plane miles off course avoiding it, hence why they were searching in the wrong area. There’s a throwaway line towards the end from the ex-fiancé along the lines of “they still don’t know what caused the crash… illegal dangerous cargo or something”. Or something like that.
I liked the movie.
It’s a bit of an adventure story but it deals with a real human being and not a superhero, robot or spy.
As a remake of Joe Versus the Volcano it was better then the original. And I liked JVtheV more then would be considered cool.
You know, some people want a friend they can kick around.
Some people. [shakes head]
Except her new husband, knowing how upset his wife is, with freaking charts and maps all over the kitchen table, somehow sleeping through Tom Hanks visiting his house, then her screaming his name, kissing him, opening the garage and giving him a car, etc. That’s one trusting man, and one heavy sleeper!
Thepackage
Sonofagun, I missed that line. If that’s true then it’s time to let that annoyance go. I’ve still got the analemma to complain about though 
Same here. I could watch Apollo 13 many times.
One thing I’ve noticed is that Tom Hanks has urinating scenes in several movies. Why is that? Apollo 13, A League of Their Own, Cast Away, The Green Mile. They all have a Hanks peeing scene. Why is that?
I don’t know if you’re being serious or kidding, but I agree completely.
I was crushed when he lost Wilson.
Having lived on a remote Pacific island for three years, I was more attuned than most people to the little details. They got most of them right, with a few bloopers - sorry I can’t remember now, it’s been years since I saw the film. IIRC, didn’t he jump out of his skin at the crash of a falling coconut early on? That’s what I mean by little details - coconuts make a gawd-awful racket when they fall.
Few actors could pull off a movie like that - Hanks is one of very few who could be continuously on screen for so long without making the audience want to through rocks at him (or coconuts).