Rating: 
Summary: Can Hanks Make a Bad Movie?
Review: I did not want to see this movie. Even though it stars Tom Hanks, quite frankly, it sounded boring as all get-out. And maybe it could have been, with any other actor.Who else but Tom Hanks can create and sustain a deep and personal relationship with a volleyball upon which he has drawn a face? Who else but Tom Hanks can nearly drown on a crude hand-built raft in high waves, looking for that same volleyball, calling its name and sobbing uncontrollably? Who else but Tom Hanks can have you sobbing with him? I won't review the plot here, since so many other reviewers have done so--and done it well. What I want to concentrate upon is Hanks' truly extraordinary acting ability. As we watch him change from cocky Fed-Ex manager extraordinaire to severely shaken plane crash survivor, to a marooned castaway on a desert island, we are drawn to him simply by the look on his face. Hanks moves from fear to frustration to anger to illness to vulnerability to joy to fear again...all the human emotions, conveyed seemingly effortlessly from a set that we know provided endless hardships for cast and crew. There are innumberable scenes that are unforgettable for the sheer strength of his acting: the above-mentioned grief over Wilson the volleyball is one; the tooth-pulling scene is another; his joy over catching a fish...there are just no words to accurately convey how brilliant this film really is. My advice: see it for yourself. It's an experience you won't soon forget.
Rating:
Summary: An Original, Captivating Experience
Review: Cast Away, directed by Robert Zemeckis and starring Tom Hanks, is one of the best pictures of 2000. Tom Hanks plays Chuck Nolan, a 40-year-old FedEx employee who is stranded on a desert island after a plane crash. This means that Tom Hanks basically IS 2/3 of Cast Away, acting all by himself with very little dialogue. This movie captivated me, watching how "Chuck" went from a workaholic average American to a Pacific islander over a period of several years psychologicaly AND phyiscally. Cast Away is a feircely imaginative movie, completly gripping and beautiful.
Rating:
Summary: The Longest Vacation of Your Life
Review: The moneymen must have been biting their fingernails over this one. They know Tom Hanks can carry a movie, but can Tom Hanks BE the movie? I'd say the answer is "yes," in a quiet sort of way. Chuck Noland (TH) is a fast-talking, time-obsessed workaholic with just enough charm to keep him from being totally obnoxious. He has a big job, probably as an industrial engineer in time management for FedEx, which is ironically omnipresent throughout the movie. Chuck barely has time to court the lovely Helen Hunt (her talents totally wasted in this vapid role). He exchanges Christmas presents with her in the car at the airport before he takes off on his fateful voyage. The plane crashes into the sea near an atoll/island. The crash is frighteningly horrific and terrifying. All hands are lost except Chuck who is thrown free of the wreckage and driving propellers, and he struggles onto shore. Up until this time, the movie is full of movement, sound, voices and has a rather brittle frenetic feel. Now all is silence. Chuck slowly gets his bearings and we are shown scenes of him trying to cope with his new situation. FedEx cargo has washed ashore with him, and he opens boxes containing ice skates, a courtier gown and a volley ball that he names "Wilson" after its maker. He is clumsy and has accidents, but we cannot help but admire his perseverance. After grueling attempts, he finally gets a fire started and dances around it in pure Tarzan style congratulating himself to the heavens above. A pause---and it is four years later. The audience gasps "Four years!" The physical changes in Chuck are astounding. From an open-faced, slightly pudgy all-American boy, he has been transformed into a gaunt, sinewy, bearded predator with wary shifting eyes. With great bravery he opts to try and find civilization rather than either suicide or living out his days alone. He painstakingly builds a raft and turns his back on the only safety he has known for four years. After great suffering and privitation, he is rescued and flung back into civilization. He reunites with his now-married girlfriend who announces he "is the love of her life." Does she realize the man standing before her is an entirely different person than the one who left her? Maybe. She goes unwillingly back to her family. Chuck is clearly uncomfortable in almost all social situations and drives to the desolate west, stopping at a crossroads wondering what direction to take. Tom Hanks is marvelous in his role. (It seems I forever say the same thing, because he is always "marvelous in his role.") The film could have cut out maybe twenty minutes and not suffered a loss. What is amazing is how he keeps your total attention and interest whether he is building a raft or talking to a volleyball.
Rating: 
Summary: A Fine Film
Review: Cast Away was a fine ilm. The acting by Tom Hanks and Helen Hunt was wonderful, and the plot was great. There were lots of messages in this film as well. Tom Hanks plays a character who works for Fed Ex. One night he has to go on an airplane to deliver packages...and it crashes. Luckily, Tom Hanks survives the crash and ends up on a deserted island, where he has to learn to fend for himself. Some of the Fed Ex packages arrive on the shore, and Tom uses what is inside to help him survive. With no one but himself, and Wilson, a volleyball with a hand imprint on it, Tom's character learns that in life you never take things for granted, and live each day with hope, because each new day brings new possibilities. The ending was a little sad, but it made sense and worked out. The film was a little long, but to fit all that into it, it had to be. Cast Away was certainly a fine film for everyone to enjoy.
Rating:
Summary: Good Family Entertainment
Review: I don't know. Definitely see the film, but this is really another character study. Tom Hanks just happens to be stranded on a tropical island. It's not about being stranded on a tropical island but about Tom Hanks trying to prove what a great character actor he is. The similar stories, movies, and T.V. shows that I saw as a child (Robinson Crusoe, Gilligan's Island, pirate stuff, Billy Budd, Typee, war movies where guys get stranded, etc.) were as fun and exciting or more so. I think that's because those shows were about the situation more than a person's feelings or emotional adaptation the situation. The whole idea of the genre is to escape mentally to a tropical island, not escape from one. We want the imagined fantasy of freedom, running around in our underwear with tropical beauties and eating coconuts, not reality.
The ending of Cast Away was cinematic poetry. People should think (but not too deeply) for a few seconds about what was going on in the last shot. I wished the moviemakers had stretched for a little more richness and depth in the part of the movie that occurs after Tom Hank's was rescued, including the very end. They didn't show any change in personality, attitudes, increase in depth of personality, religious awakening, etc. People who have been in different but far less intense situations, like the Peace Corp, for example, have come back with much more significantly changed attitudes and values about life. The change could even have been that he came back as a basket case. It shows a shallowness in the moviemaker's understanding of people both in the Tom Hank's character and in audiences. I did think Meg Ryan's reactions to Tom Hank's release were well done and authentic. But this is a movie you watch to be entertained not to analyze!
Tom Hank's is trying too hard to be taken seriously as a great character actor. I think he's trying to compete with Dinero and Nicholson-- "star" character actor.
When we watch Cast Away, we're watching Tom Hanks, and America loves Tom Hanks. But when we watch Deniro in movies like Mean Streets and Taxi, we're watching the character. Everything Deniro does with the character fits in perfectly. Robert Deniro never draws attention to himself in a movie. He draws attention to the character he is playing. The same can be said of the younger Robert Duvall.
And sorry, I don't think I can judge female actors. I sense that many of the great ones were before my time. But I would put Vivian Leigh on any list of the best. I am not moved by Merryl Streep. I think she is more intellectual in preparation than say a Julia Roberts who can emote anything. Meryl Streep is one who learns accents well, learns to do Irish step dancing, etc to prepare for roles, but can you imagine her trying to play some of the characters Julia Roberts has played? The movies would bomb.
Rating: 
Summary: A FED-EX COMMERCIAL
Review: The movie was fine. Good. Okay. Whatever. But if I had known it was a Fed-Ex commercial, I would have avoided it. Whatever happened to making up company names so that you don't become a SELL-OUT? Go ahead, try to watch this movie and ignore FED-EX continually flashing in your face. Believe me, they did NOT have to do it. All it does is distract and disrupt to make them MORE MONEY that they DON'T NEED. I say: DON'T SEE IT ON PRINCIPLE. This movie isn't good enough to be worth supporting a sell-out. I gave it one star to make a dent in the ratings, but without the Fed-Ex, it's maybe a two & a half.
Rating:
Summary: Another Hanks hit
Review: Castaway was a journey into one person's ability to survive. You can take all the special effects of the plane crash and either like them or hate them, but the main theme of this movie is survival. I think that Hanks was brilliant in his role as a Fed Ex worker that must learn to live on a deserted island. The one drawback is that we do not get to see the full progression of this. We see him first struggling to live on the island and eat food, and then jump years later to see he has mastered island life. Some people might find the silence and lack of dialogue on the island as boring, but I think it is to give the audience the sense of isolation that Hanks' character is feeling. The great thing about this movie is that it makes one examine themselves if they were in a similar predicament. I think if you overexamine the special effects and the "unbelievability" of Hanks being able to survive a plane crash, then you may be disappointed. I think examining the movie as a whole and understanding its message or theme will make it more enjoyable. I thought it was well produced.
Rating: 
Summary: I could not decide whether to sleep or watch!
Review: This movie was a terrible bore. Very exciting start when the plane went down, but very laughable to find out that Tom Hanks was able to survuve the crash from 20-25,000 feet. Now, this was not reality, but come on. Then it becomes a sleeper until the last 15 minutes when Hanks dialogue becomes more believable...
Rating:
Summary: Cast Away: With Emotions--Not So Easy to Do
Review: The job that one has makes it likely that one will develop a personality that is a function of that job. In Robert Zemeckis' CAST AWAY, Chuck Noland (Tom Hanks) plays a FedEx executive whose life revolves around the clock. If a package is late for delivery, someone under his command will catch hell. For him, time is a precious commodity, and can be measured by the units of the clock, not by the ticks of the heart. This is his life, and he and his fiancee, played briefly by Helen Hunt, do not seem unhappy with that. His life changes and not just because he is cut off from the world for five years as he is marooned on a tropical island after a plane crash. Most critics who comment on the movie point out that CAST AWAY is really an allegory of man's struggle for survival in an inhospitable environment against long odds. Now certainly there is that subtext, but if that is the major point of the film, then why bother to have the first part where he is time driven or the last part where he seeks to re-establish emotional roots that were uprooted years before? I see a different message: people are a function of their environment, which shapes their behavior, their food, their entertainment, their relations, or even their self-image. This shaping imprints itself strongly with time, and a change of environment does not result in an immediate change within. The body and the soul need time to 'catch up.' For Chuck Noland, his years on the island served to whittle away his outer shell of a clock-based life. Slowly, he learns to eat, to swim, to care for his teeth in a rhythm dictated by the stars overhead, not by the watch that he misses more than all else. When he miraculously reappears in his former life, he has to reset his internal clock once again. The scene in which he plays with a match in his hotel room, lighting it effortlessly, producing a flame that he could not on his island, point out that though he is now in a hotel room, his mind has not yet made the temporal leap from the island. It may take years for him to readjust himself, as the concluding scene with the pretty girl with the truck indicates. But he might, and this lesson in the slow acceptance of how changes in life cause changes in behavior resonate more powerfully than merely pondering the survival techniques of the latest Robinson Crusoe.
Rating:
Summary: Cast Away
Review: Cast Away
The first thought I had after seeing this film was whether or not I fully understood all of what I had seen. Posing this question will undoubtedly offer no easy answers, which for a film like Cast Away is probably a good thing. Cast Away begins with Fed Ex Executive Chuck Nolan (Tom Hanks in another stellar performance) explaining to his employee's that quote "We live by the clock". It's Christmas Eve and Chuck is enjoying a good meal with family and friends when his beeper rings and he finds himself forced to go out on a quick job. He tells his beautiful girlfriend Kelly (Helen Hunt) that he will be home in time for new years celebrations. He promises. However a tragic plane crash into the ocean (which is very thrilling and realistic) changes all that. Now Chuck will no longer be living by the clock because he's now got all the time in the world. A trailer that gives away the entire movie ruined cast Away for many people. A spokes man for 20th Century Fox Entertainment said that Cast Away is movie about a man lost at sea and how he deals with coming home to world of change. Frankly I do not see it that way. I am a firm believer that people want to be surprised when they go to the movies. The only other quibble I have about the movie is the ending from which I think we the viewers are left with too many questions. Besides those problems I walked out of the theatre feeling really satisfied with what I had seen. The acting is top flight. The cinematography is excellent and the score is also a plus. One thing to mention to people is that there isn't allot of dialogue in the movie which may turn some people off. However, those people not too fussy may find this film truly riveting. For me it was a breathtaking experience. Review: **** out of five
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