Castaway Film Review

In the film Castaway, Chuck Noland, played by Tom Hanks, is a FedEx employee who, after a plane crash, becomes stranded on an island for four years. During his time on the island, Chuck is forced to change to adapt to the pastoral environment of his new home.

Before becoming stranded on the island he was obsessed with time because of his job, even saying "We live and we die by time. And we must not commit the sin of losing our track on time." However, when he is stranded on the island he doesn't even know what time it is, the watch he had with him stopped working and he only kept it because it had his girlfriend's picture in it.

When he was working he was always talking to people and telling them how to do their jobs and what they were doing wrong. He wasn't very good at personal conversations though, when his friend's wife was ill he didn't know what he should say. When on the island though he found that he needed someone to talk to, so when he cut his hand and bled on a volleyball he made it into a friend for him to talk to. He talked to the volleyball as a friend and after he returned to society he was better at personal conversations because he realized how important they were.

At his job with FedEx he was in complete control, he would go to a location and fix everything that wasn't working perfectly and everyone did what he said. On the island, he had no control over his life. When he had decided that no one would ever find him he decided to kill himself and he planned to hang himself from a tree on a cliff. But, when he tested his plan with a log he saw that the tree broke and that he would have bled to death slowly on the rocks. He realized that, on the island, "I couldn't even kill myself the way I wanted to. I had power over nothing." This lack of power was hard for him to accept after coming from a life where he had complete control.

Even simple things like lighting a fire were much more difficult on the island. His separation from the environment he was used to caused him many problems. He had to spend days trying to start a fire and when he finally did he was very excited, yelling "Aha. Look what I've created. I have made fire." When he returns, he is in his room after a party and finds a lighter and just turns it on and off, amazed at how simple it is. Making rope was a very long process as well. When Chuck needed rope to lash together his raft, he had to go through the island collecting plants and then weave together parts of them to make rope. He could only make fifteen feet of rope in an entire day of work.

Because of all the changes in his environment, Chuck is forced to adapt to his new surroundings. He learns how to do things that he didn't know before. He taught himself how to make a fire by rubbing two sticks together. He began talking to Wilson because he needed social interaction and there was no one else there for him to talk to. He found new uses for things that would otherwise be useless to him, such as video tapes. Chuck was terrible at catching fish when he first got to the island, but after he had been there for a while he could easily catch them by throwing a spear from a distance. He had to become innovative in order to survive and he made that change.

Life on the island for Chuck was both more simple and more complicated. He had less he needed to do, only keep himself alive, but the tasks he needed to accomplish in order to do that were much more complex than they had been off the island. He needed a fire for heat and for cooking, but there were no matches on the island so he had to spend days trying to start the fire. When he cut his leg he couldn't just buy a bandage, he had to make his own to stop the bleeding. He would have enjoyed being able to visit a dentist to have his tooth fixed, but instead he had to remove it on his own.

He also had to adapt once again when he returned to society. He had been away for so long that he couldn't just come back to his life as he had left it. While on the island he had been declared dead and they had even had a funeral for him. He couldn't return to Kelly because she had been forced to move on with her life, and had married someone else. Chuck remembered how he had known they wouldn't be together, "We both had done the math. Kelly added it all up and knew she had to let me go. I added it up, and knew that I had lost her; 'cause I was never gonna get off that island." Chuck's return to society was like starting a new life, his job was gone, his home was gone, and his girl was gone. Everything he had wanted to get off the island for wasn't even there anymore.