Okay, good bust. My own experience is limited to a Navy cruiser, where we once retrieved a dead body and another time even stopped to pick up and report an empty life ring (it had probably just blown off the side of the ship it belonged to).
Still, I have to think (although I haven’t read Adrift) that those ships Callahan saw never got as close to him as the freighter was to Chuck. In fact, it’s even fair to suppose we saw the ship so close because it had already spotted him a ways off, and was pulling alongside to lower their accommodation ladder.
And, it was broad daylight, and (to borrow a term from astronomy) Chuck and his raft had a pretty high albedo. Maybe I’m being naive, but as a former mariner I did find his rescue to be credible.
Why did he save the package? - Well, he could then claim that all the time he was on the stupid island he was actually at work - so how about some overtime, and not just stinking straight back pay? You gotta be careful in these uncertain times.
I was waiting for them to open the package at the end and find one of those satellite cell phones. Instead of raw crab, he could have called for Domino’s and would have had a nice hot pizza in a half hour.
The unopened package had wings on it. The wings are an ancient symbol of hope. Remember Emily Dickinson: “Hope is the thing with feathers.” It was the hope inspired in him by the wing symbolism that kept him going and struggle to survive and be rescued.
Did anyone notice when his makeshift “sail” with wings painted on it blew away in a gale? I swear I saw it flapping just like a real pair of flying wings.
Um, am I the only one that saw the men on the ship? Just before it cuts away to the next scene, you can see several men on top of the ship looking in Tom’s direction.
My wife was pretty bored by the movie – I too could have watched him on the island for another hour. I thought that for the rational guy Hanks was playing, he’d have prepared earlier to be on the island for a L-O-N-G time. He didn’t even take the clothing from the dead pilot . . .
But the real question is: what was the consideration that FedEx had to pay for all of the logo placements? Plus the little speech from Fred Smith, FedEx chairman? $10M?
Where the hell was Chuck’s family during the last act? The party that he was at before getting on the plane was for his family (not his girlfriend’s), IIRC, so they’re undoubtedly local to Memphis.
This also leads to my next question: why was he left alone for his first night back?
Oh yeah, so he could sneak over to his ex’s house to see her.
Good question, Montfort. I suppose Zemeckis just wanted the focus to be on Chuck and Kelly. Bringing in Chuck’s parents, siblings or whomever may have been more realistic, but it would have muddied the story. “Realistic” isn’t always “better.”
I do sort of wonder why it was four whole weeks from his retrieval by the freighter to his return to Memphis. Even in the middle of the Pacific, the ship shouldn’t have been a whole month from its next port of call.
What I was having trouble with, and it was probably very necessary for the drama of the film, was the fact that Hanks ’ character jumped off his raft to try to rescue Wilson when he was drifting away. Why didn’t he row the raft over to Wilson?
did he have oars at that point? I thought they floated away…and maybe he just wasn’t thinking too rationally. He was a bit cuckoo at the end of the film
That’s what I thought on two occasions. He made eye contact with the whale that night, then on two more occasions, you hear a kind of spouting like a whale’s blow hole would make, which was really the ship cutting through the water (can’t remember the other occasion). Anyway, I thought that the whale was going to lead him to safety or something, I thought to myself, “that’s absurd, if that happens, I’m leaving.” In all truthfulness, it would have been kind of funny in a hokey kind of way if it did happen.
I’m pretty sure the oars were gone, because of the storm. That’s why Wilson was able to get away, because the storm had trashed the raft and torn it apart.
I believe jeel was right in saying that Chuck dropped the oars AFTER Wilson floats away into oblivion.
Makes sense when you see that Chuck is panicked after suddenly waking up ans seeing his ball buddy gone. Prolly didn’t realize he even had an oar until he swam back to logs after leaving him.
I know what you meant, and that’s what I was responding to. We’d already met Chuck’s FedEx cronies. If his family members had been at the party (or in any scene following his return) it would’ve meant introducing new characters 90 minutes into the movie, detracting from the Kelly situation, and that’s just bad storytelling.
About the oars: he still had them when Wilson floated away. Don’t you all remember, in the next scene after Chuck lost Wilson, he took the oars in his arms and ceremoniously threw them into the ocean? I read that as him symbolically giving up, resigning himself to dying at sea.
The other occasion was when Wilson was floating away. Hank’s character is asleep. You hear the spouting sound, and water splashes across his face, waking him up. (Same thing that happened when the ship arrived.)
I just saw this last night. We got lucky in that there was little laughing during the Wilson scenes; Personally I thought the moment he lost Wilson was very powerful. The audience was engrossed in this movie, so for that reason alone, I think Zemeckis did a nice job. I think many people however, left with the “is that it”? or “I can’t believe it ended that way.”
After the movie, we drove home and discussed it… one thing that bothered my better half was that Kelly claimed that he was the love of her life, and yet in 4 years she not only got over him, but got married and had a child. I don’t remember how old the child was (or if they said), but even if the kid was a baby (and by judging by Kelly’s body the kid was a year or more… anyone remember the pictures on the refrigerator?)… that means that Kelly would have been married after about 2 years after the loss of Chuck. Assuming a 6 month courtship, that’s a year and a half. And this is a woman that was relationship adverse. I guess my question is, did this bother anyone else? Can someone truly get over the “love of their life”, (especially under the circumstances that Kelly thought she lost Chuck) that quickly? The last moment of their pre-crash relationship was the engagement ring… and she said she wasn’t ready for that… and 4 years later she has a husband and a child.
This movie bothered me to no end. Just like Forrest Gump, I think the number one thing, as has been mentioned before, is its amazing lack of subtlety.
Add to that zero character development for Hanks and Hunt – these are blank people who we know very little about. All that I know about Hanks’s character was he was work-driven, time-oriented, and committed to Hunt, and that 4 years on an isolated island changed him. No shit Sherlock (excuse my French). All that I know about Helen Hunt’s character is that she was female.
Next, I feel that Zemeckis cut out all the truly interesting scenes. To name a few - any scene midpoint during the stay on the island. A 4 year break from day 2 to 2 months from the end of his stay was bordering on deus ex machina. I’d have liked to see a scene of him getting aboard the ship, of him arriving in the port of call, some reaction to his arrival besides Helen Hunt keeling over, and something besides an ambiguous ending. I’m getting sick of Hollywood directors feeling that in order to be artsy they need to make an ending ambiguous and open for interpretation. The point of a movie is to tell a story. Don’t force someone to “think” about a movie’s ending unless you give him adequate data to extrapolate. I especially hate Zemeckis’s forced ambiguity – “That way to Mexico, That way to Canada, That way to just about anything.” Blech. Also, can we spend more than 2 scenes throwing away the object of Tom Hanks’s 4 year fixation?
I do feel that the plane crash scene made the entire movie. It was incredibly well done. Also the acting was quite well done, but without out premier acting, this movie would have been more boring than watching paint dry.
IIRC (just saw the film last night) there was mention that the crash was believed to have occurred as a result of an explosion arising from the fact that improperly labeled hazardous materials were shipped on the aircraft. We can only assume that this volatile material was destabilized by the storm - turbulence & lightening etc… This causation would provide many defendants against whom Mr. Noland would have recourse - Fedex for no having systems in place to detect such cargo, the originator for not properly labeling the shipment, the manufacturer etc. Yeah, Fedex would be protected by the workers’ comp. statutes, unless they went deep into gross negligence territory, which would be for the civil justice system to decide.
By the way, I also cringed when he left the leather belt and tie on poor old Al. Gross oversight.
Also…is it just me or was Tom a bit of a lame-o when it came to making fire? Holy smokes…no pun intended, but I couldn’t believe how long he took to get it right, or even start on the job for that matter. I was actually relieved when the mag-lite died so it would hurry him along to finally get started on the fire thing. Why didn’t he just take out the batteries when they were still juiced, extract the wiring from the casing and touch pos to negative to generate a spark? Hell, he could have used the buckle from Al’s belt in lieu of legit wire if it was in short supply. (Am I missing something…other than compassion and modesty?)
There was no laughter in the theater where I saw it, period. Come to think of it there was less than ten people. That could be a contributinmg factor.
Finally, IMHO it should’ve been two separate films…one about coming home from an ordeal where everybody thinks you’re dead and you wife has understandably bailed on you, and other full length feature addressing survival challenges and sanity on a desert isle. The combo thing was too much to pull off in a single film.
The sun only moves about 47 degrees, total, so no, not necessarily.
The round image of light was most probably intended as an image of the sun, not the hole through which the sun shined. Any shape small hole produces a circular image of the sun–that was in many papers last December during the Christmas eclipse. The image was maybe one inch wide, so the hole in the cave would be about ten feet away, the same ratio as the size of the sun to the sun’s distance from earth.
The Internet Movie Data Base, Cast Away goofs says that the drawing of the analemma is “incorrectly regarded as a goof,” but local noon is always due south, so they are wrong–unless Chuck Noland drew the analemma as a calendar and then just used it as a reference. Without a watch, there is no way that I can think of that he could have generated it from the spot of light.
What I want to know is, why was Helen Hunt running down the driveway, yelling Jack?