Yarrrrgh! I meant Friday, of course. 
silly me.
Glad we werent the only ones who didnt understand the package thing. But I have another question:
At the end, Helen Hunt is showing Tom the map which details the flight path, the crash location, the island, etc. I swear she says that after the crash, Tom drifted for 500 miles to the island. Well I got the impression at the beginning of the movie that the plane crashed and Tom found the island on the same night. Could he drift for 500 miles in one night? If he didnt in one night, how did he survive that long? Or was Helen saying he drifted 500 miles from the island before getting picked up by the ship?
And I missed the whole thing about him trying to hang himself as well.
I also thought the movie went too far with the volleyball thing. I didnt find it funny, just too drawn out.
BTW, I still dont think Tom deserved the Oscar for Forrest Gump. I thought he deserved it for Philadelphia and I could see him getting one for CastAway…but Forrest Gump? No way…thats my two cents.
He drifted 500 miles after leaving the island before being picked up by the freighter.
I just got back from seeing this movie. I definitely think Tom Hanks and Helen Hunt did excelent acting jobs, communicating tons of emotion with barely any dialog. Oscars are definitely deserved. Although with Hanks doing such a good job on every role he takes, and being offered such good roles constantly now, I think they should just give him a special pre-emptive lifetime achievement award, and get it over with. Otherwise, the Oscars might start getting pretty boring!
The biggest flaws in the movie were the incredibly trite line he said to his friend about the sun rising and never knowing what tomorrow’s tide will bring ([Annie]“Tooooooooomorrow! Tomorrow! I love ya! Tomorrow!”[/Annie] Puh-lese.) and the ending with the cute redhead. Unlike the rest of you, though, I think the answer was for the third act to be longer. (As well as the first two–the movie should have been at least three hours, but the mopes who buy most of the tickets wouldn’t sit through it. Maybe a director’s cut.)
Most movies, especially action movies, have an artifical ending that ignores the trauma that lasts beyond realizing your husband is really a serial killer/fighting off aliens/escaping a sinking sub/averting global nuclear destruction/whatever. I admire Zemeckis for attempting to show the things that usually happen after the credits roll. I only wish he had had the time to deal with it more deeply.
BTW, I thought a few of the early scenes with Wilson were meant to be funny, or at least wry (e.g. “You wouldn’t happen to have a match would you.”). The scene in which Wilson was lost, however, was pure drama, exceptionally powerful. There were a couple of people in my theater who snickered at that scene, too. I wanted to make them suffer.
Speaking of Wilson, my mother told me she read somewhere that Wilson sports equipment payed nothing for the product placement–it was done strictly for the plot. Does anyone know what FedEx’s relationship with the movie was? I assume they payed a lot, but it didn’t make me want to send anything with them. Like lawoot said, it made their people look kind of like jerks.
Dignan, one trailer for the movie can be found here. No footprint, though.
Sorry for such a long post. My low postcount belies my verbosity. (Hey, that could be a sig!)
I was pretty pissed at the insensitivity of his colleagues also, but there’s no way for them to really “get” what he had gone through. Like the scene where Chris Noth tries to explain how hard this had all been on Helen Hunt – they’ve all thought of him as dead, or in a coma, for four years and have no grasp of his experiences.
His calendar was an analemma (www.analemma.com). It marks the position of the sun at the time it crosses the meridian. I don’t know how well it would have worked in the cave, since the opening was high and circular. At some point(s) during the year the sun would’ve been too low in the sky to cross the opening.
My question, which I’ve not seen addressed, is: did he not have a distinctive melanoma above his right eye in the latter part of the movie? It wasn’t as distinctive after the rescue, but it seemed obvious enough that I thought it would be a plot point later.
Alan - I heard somewhere that they paid for the product placement after much discussion. It was widely considered a gutsy move.
jrpeka - I did notice the large sore, but didn’t think much of it. But it was there.
I definitely laughed at some of the wilson scenes, but not the one where wilson drifts away. That one was just too poignant and sad. I think the most important point of the party scene in the hotel room was that they wasted all of that great seafood! He probably would have killed for a plate of crab legs on the island, but of course we have such excessive resources of these things here that we never really appreciate what we have.
I had read articles about this movie that spoke of how risky it was for the whole middle of the movie to be just Tom on the island, with no supporting actors to play off of. Strangely, I found this to be the most engaging, interesting part of the movie. I could have watched at least another hour just on the island. I was disappointed when the scene switched abruptly to four years later. I felt like a good bit of development was missing in the middle there.
Also, did anyone else feel royally cheated by the trailer? the first one I saw, in early 2000, was a great teaser, making me totally want to run right out and see the movie. The next one I saw, around October 2000, revealed more details of the crash, that he got off the island and got rescued, AND what Kelly’s reaction was going to be when he knocked on her door afterwards. There were no surprises in the movie for me except the fact that even knowing exactly what was going to happen, I was never bored.
I started thinking about legal issues, too. (Spoils a lot of movies for me…)
My legal question was what happened with his life insurance policy. Undoubtedly, the insurance company had paid out the claim (double indemnity, no less, since it was an accidental death). So did his family have to repay the insurance benefits? What if they already spent the money on a trip to Tahiti? (;))
Oh yeah, and speaking of legal issues, Stoidela wrote:
As his employer, FedEx would be immune from any lawsuit for on-the-job injury. (Including emotional trauma.) Hanks’s only recourse against FedEx would be via the avenue of a workers’ compensation claim. Workers’ compensation typically only pays off with lost wages (at a reduced rate) and medical expenses, plus relatively small lump sum compensation for any permanent injury. Hanks would most definitely not get rich going after FedEx.
Now he might have a claim against the manufacturer of the airplane, or perhaps against whoever did maintenance on the plane (if that were done by an independent contractor and not by FedEx), but only if it could be proven that the crash occurred because of a mechanical defect in the plane.
The real money for Hanks’s character would come on the talk show circuit / lecture circuit. Plus, I would imagine he could get a pretty good book advance on his story.
In am dismayed by those posters who can’t imagine how Hanks could have survived without antibiotics. We have become a race of candy-asses! (Kidding, kidding…)
Penicillen only came into common use in the 40’s. We did manage to survive as a race before it came along. The body is pretty good at healing itself. I had a pretty nasty leg wound on coral myself once. Exactly what happened to (Hanks). In the same place on my leg, even. It healed without medical treatment.
Yeah, imagine what kind of money he’d get for the film rights to his story! 
BTW, was I the only one to pick up on the awful symbolism in his name (Chuck Noland)?
… and the winner of the Academy Award for the category “Best supporting actor”, is … Wilson!
Bill
I liked Cast Away, and I say that as one who normally hates Robert Zemeckis. I’ve got a few specific responses to this threa so far. Look for your name:
zev_steinhardt: The package wasn’t going from Memphis as such. Memphis is FedEx’s headquarters and hub, so most of their packages go there before heading on to their destinations (and Memphis consequently has one of the busiest airports in the world, although there’s not much passenger traffic).
Smeghead, you told Montfort Chuck could have memorized the sender/addressee information off the packages. Even more so, he could have just kept the delivery receipts from the packages. We didn’t see them, but they could easily have been among his other supplies on the raft that we didn’t see.
Montfort:
This post implies (and so does the movie, sort of) that he needed to wake up and get someone’s atention on the freighter (freighter, mind you, not tanker) or he wouldn’t have been rescued.
Ships at see maintain lookouts 24/7 to prevent collisions. By the time the freighter was as close as it was in that scene, they would have seen Chuck’s raft a long time ago.
And when a ship’s crew sees a man in the middle of the ocean, clad in rags on a raft that’s visibly falling apart, they’re not going to wait for him to ask for help. Whether he woke up or not at that point he was already as good as rescued.
Dignan: About the seafood at the party: I didn’t think it made his coworkers look like jerks; I thought it illustrated Zemeckis’s ineptness as a director. I swear, the man puts the “b” in “subtle.”
spoke-, others: In addition to four years’ back pay, I’m sure someone in Chuck’s position would get a promotion, a company car, a corner office, etc. etc. Regardless of any legal responsibilities FedEx may have had. Don’t you all realize what a PR bonanza an event like that would be? Even if he’d been a mediocre employee before, the world would be at his feet.
I’m aware the package didn’t originate in Memphis. But at that point, the package was physically in Memphis and supposed to go to Texas. What the heck was it doing on a plane to the South Pacific?
Zev Steinhardt
What I want to know is why a pair of ice skates(???) was headed for Indonesia?
To be used as a plot device in a movie??
Zev Steinhardt
You’re right, I saw the same thing with the lookouts in that Titanic movie. Silly me.
Another thought… Why didn’t Chuck start a big-ass fire on the peak of the mountain on the island? Surely one would’ve caught the eye of someone either at sea (unlikely) or watching a satellite (more likely).
'Cause it would be way too much work. It was hard enough for him to make the climb alone, how difficult would it be to drag a lot of logs up there? How long would he have had to spend feeding the fire? He’d have hardly had time to stab crabs and trade repartee with sporting goods.
Five wrote:
"This post implies (and so does the movie, sort of) that he needed to wake up and get someone’s atention on the freighter (freighter, mind you, not tanker) or he wouldn’t have been rescued.
Ships at see maintain lookouts 24/7 to prevent collisions. By the time the freighter was as close as it was in that scene, they would have seen Chuck’s raft a long time ago.
And when a ship’s crew sees a man in the middle of the ocean, clad in rags on a raft that’s visibly falling apart, they’re not going to wait for him to ask for help. Whether he woke up or not at that point he was already as good as rescued."
I am currently reading “Adrift” by Steve Callahan. I am at a point in the book where he has seen three ships so far, and each time he has fired off flares. In fact, one ship passes by so closely that “if anyone is looking, it is impossible for him not to see me.” (p. 66) Callahan states that: only Navy ships have the manpower and desire to keep constant lookouts. “In the open ocean, captains of merchant ships may keep only one of his few crew on the bridge to take a cursory glance about the horizon every now and then.” (p. 67) He writes that that lookout is only keeping his eye out for other ships. This guy was firing FLARES up and was not spotted. I think it was actually very lucky that Noland was spotted. In fact, reading this book, it makes the whole rescue actually very fake.
I didn’t think it made his co-workers look like jerks, either. I’m not sure what you mean. You might want to re-read my earlier post.
I think when they were talking about ‘drifting’ 500 miles, they were talking about the airplane. On the distress call, the pilot mentioned they were south 500 miles off course, trying to avoid the storm (I believe) but of course all he got back was static. Also, when Hanks is calculating the possible search area, he mentions the 500 mile difference due to the plane.
All in all I thought it was a good movie. The ending with Helen Hunt wasn’t trite…as it was pointed out earlier, the underlying emotion and intensity in the room was very well acted.
zev_steinhardt:
It was coming from Texas, not going to. At the beginning of the movie we saw welder/sculptress Bettina Peterson send a similar package to her philandering husband in Moscow, and dialogue implied she did this often (maybe he was her representative, selling Bettina’s objet d’arts to the Russian elite).
The package that wound up on the island with Chuck went from Texas to Memphis, then halfway across the Pacific en route to Moscow. Maybe the plane was headed for FedEx’s Asian hub for further sorting onto a plane bound for Moscow.
Chuck was taking it back to Bettina, in a scene which further illustrates Zemeckis’s pathological lack of subtlety, to wit:
- Chuck works for FedEx and so lives in Memphis.
- Chuck lives in Memphis, so of course he’s an Elvis fan.
- Chuck’s an Elvis fan, so when he returns Bettina’s package he must have “Return To Sender” playing on his car stereo.