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By updating Robinson Crusoe for contemporary audiences, director Robert Zemeckis (Forrest Gump) and megastar Tom Hanks created one of the more unusual and engrossing Hollywood movies to wash up on the big screen in quite a while. Hanks plays Chuck Noland, a workaholic Federal Express engineer whose plane goes down over the South Seas, leaving him stranded alone on the proverbial desert island for four years -- a cruelly ironic fate for a man obsessed with time to the point of compulsion. For the better part of Cast Away, we watch as Hanks figures out how to stay alive using the meager resources available to him -- including the contents of the FedEx packages that wash ashore from his wreck -- and his rudimentary progress makes for entertainment as involving as any effects-laden blockbuster. There is suspense in anticipating how he will solve the problems that confront him: opening a coconut, collecting drinking water, and most daunting of all, making fire. Cast Away, like its hero, only comes alive when stripped of the trappings of civilization. Everything leading up to and following Noland's stay on the island -- even the extended and terrifying plane crash -- feel beside the point. There is more genuine pathos in his final scene with the anthropomorphized volleyball that becomes his cherished companion than there is in any of the teary-eyed exchanges with girlfriend Helen Hunt. Although the movie is overly freighted with allegorical and spiritual significance, the scenes on the island work because they hark back to primal pleasures of earliest cinema, when audiences were spellbound simply by the sight of a human being on the screen going through the basic routines of existence. Kryssa Schemmerling

All Movie Guide

An exploration of human survival and the ability of fate to alter even the tidiest of lives with one major event, Cast Away tells the story of Chuck Noland (Tom Hanks), a Federal Express engineer who devotes most of his life to his troubleshooting job. His girlfriend Kelly (Helen Hunt) is often neglected by his dedication to work, and his compulsive personality suggests a conflicted man. But on Christmas Eve, Chuck proposes marriage to Kelly right before embarking on a large assignment. On the assignment, a plane crash strands Chuck on a remote island, and his fast-paced life is slowed to a crawl, as he is miles removed from any human contact. Finding solace only in a volleyball that he befriends, Chuck must now learn to endure the emotional and physical stress of his new life, unsure of when he may return to the civilization he knew before. Cast Away reunites star Hanks with director Robert Zemeckis, their first film together since 1994's Oscar-winning Forrest Gump. Jason Clark

Entertainment Weekly

Hanks towers as a near naked, near biblical man. Zemeckis tells his story -- the screenplay is by William Broyles -- with a control magnificent in what isn't shown as much as in what is. Lisa Schwartzbaum

Product Details

• UPC: 024543036654
• Source: 20TH CENTURY FOX
• Sales Rank: 64,219

This DVD is also available as part of a box set:

• Solaris / Cast Away
• Flight of the Phoenix / Cast Away