If anything, the Zemeckis-work Cast Away is about how one event can make your whole life turn out just as it would've otherwise, and how even during times of anomaly the important things in life are the ones you expected. It's about everything you already know about maroonings, or think you do, and about how what think you know is basically as good as what you really know anyway. In any case it's not about anything you didn't know or couldn't have guessed, and though there are moments when you're called upon to think about something you've never seen before, don't worry, because they putty over those spots with prefab digitized visualizations. It's really quite restful.

Generated primarily from the point of view and for the benefit of various brands and products, this is a dramedy of objects, shot on location on and around scenic Tom Hanks. The action begins when the FedEx Association of Packages sets out to bring a Chuck Noland (Hanks) from his docking station (Helen Hunt), to a distant location for some package-purpose. The plan begins well enough, but in transit the airplane who's carrying the Chuck suffers an unscheduled and fatal rupture, collapsing before it can tell the Association what has happened. A valiant life raft is able to retrieve the Chuck and carry it to a small storage island nearby but is grievously wounded in the process. Surviving members of the Association straggle ashore and organize an effort to protect and serve their cargo. This supporting cast includes Teknalite, Reebok, and an uncredited pair of ice skates, as well as a number of uncredited native rocks and sticks, but the outstanding performance of Wilson Volleyball as the Team Leader might change the way you think about sports equipment, or maybe about leaders, or teams. Something.

The main problem is that they forgot to make the movie part—to show someone's idea of...Man In Isolation maybe, or Reunions After Long Absences. Anyone's idea of anything might have made a movie of it. They did get the man-prop onto the island, and they got it off again, and they framed that idyll in a romantical frame-story, but they forgot to make any of it matter—it barely even happens. Apparently Robert Zemeckis has no thoughts at all about humans in groups or in isolation—what happens to us in one state or the other, whether either is better for us, whether there's anything to be known about either state at all. It is a sweet commercial of hope for all the SUV survivalists who have always suspected that they'd be able to take care of themselves if they had to, dude, but apart from that there's apparently nothing inherently interesting about being either in the world or out of it.

The picture's defining failure-flag comes halfway through. Hanks has arrived on the little island and, as you've seen in the famous scene from the ads, made fire. He's begun his first efforts at establishing a way to live there and is just getting more or less adjusted when there's a fade to black. After the break we're presented with the words "FOUR YEARS LATER" and all of a sudden it's four years later, so he begins to prepare his escape. Small wonder, since apparently in fifteen hundred days of deprivation and solitude not one single thing has happened that was so interesting you might put it in a movie about being marooned on an island.

Or has it? While building the raft he means to escape on Hanks gets into an argument with the volleyball and ALLUDES to some Dark Event that happened once... Later on, while talking to a human person he REVEALS that in fact that event was an attempted suicide! But Zemeckis feels that a protagonist's actual suicide attempt and the thoughts and events surrounding it can't match the significance of the surprise and wonder we might feel at hearing about it afterwards: "So that's what that was about with Wilson! He tried to kill himself? Now I get it!" It's as though Zemeckis is purposely designing this show for the people who mutter running commentaries and conversations with the screen through the whole length of a movie; he keeps them fed with bite-sized mystifications to keep their attention from wandering.

He has to do that if there's going to be any structure, because this alleged movie is actually a two-and-a-half-hour compilation episode of your favorite scenes from this movie, each with its own extra-special effect inside for a crunchy, juicy crunch. Hardly anything matters beyond the famous scene it appears in. On at least five occasions Chuck sustains some kind of significant injury, but none of them has any sort of consequences once it's finished—like a cartoon, Chuck can be injured but never damaged, so each wound is never more than another owie. The various gashings are vividly depicted so you gasp in sympathy when they happen, but once that buzz is past they're dismissed. Ooh! Owie!

Not that he should have gotten a mortal infection from every coral

nick—for a movie that makes a big show of being about the physical world it's wildly fantastic, so we can't be picky about the realism—but as a rule the things you specifically show or describe in your work should be the things you mean for it to be about, not the things it's not about. "Aboutness" can be a tricky thing, but for instance, if you show a character playing with a gun in one scene it should probably be fired later on. Not necessarily, but probably. And if you show a character playing with guns in five different scenes but nobody ever shoots one, you're going to need some kind of reason—explicit or not—for either the absence of shots or the presence of guns. Otherwise they can only be either a) distracting or b) a distraction, which is to say an extra-special effect. Guns that won't be fired should generally be left out of dramas because we feel guns are extra-ordinary; buildings, on the other hand, are ordinary, so you can show and even feature any number of buildings in a movie without it seeming strange if the characters never use them. Open wounds are extra-ordinary, and especially so when the nearest medic is four years away since everyone knows you could get a mortal infection from every coral nick. They should be applied sparingly if you're not going to make your movie be about them, and injuries that turn out not to be serious don't matter by definition; they should be left out to make room for the stuff we can't assume.

Surprisingly, human-volleyball relations get the same superficial treatment. With the blood from his gashed palm Chuck makes a stylish face for Wilson and the two become fast friends and seem to have many long discussions—by four-years-later time they're bickering just like an old couple. Chuck and Wilson spend a lot of time together, and, like Hal in 2001, Wilson is the better-looking, so we all get pretty attached to him.

So when Wilson eventually meets his doom—by falling off the raft—and Chuck can't save him, it's understandable, however disordered, for Chuck to have a ululating fit of lamentations. Crazy, yes, but you know what he means; that made-up relationship is really the best part of the movie, being nearly the only thing that does persist from one scene to another. Chuck's brief anguish shows that something has mattered. There's a little bit of an idea there—people need people! No, it's not much, but it's something. But the end of that conniption is the last we ever hear of Wilson—the most important relationship Chuck had for the entire period the show is concerned with, but as soon as he meets his end, pop, he's forgotten.

If they want us to go along with Chuck's attachment to the ball to the extent that we're expected not just to accept but to feel his grief, then due respect needs to be paid to it—not to the ball necessarily, though that is one option, but absolutely to that late attachment and the grief, which is depicted as being as real as any you would feel for a non-imaginary friend. If it doesn't matter enough to return to, why was it there to begin with?

Sweetheart Kelly gets the same treatment once she recurs. When Chuck gets back after his blank four years he learns that she, reasonably enough, has married someone else after all. Naturally their reunion is a big stressor for the both of them, but after a little frantic grappling and mutual hysteria they sensibly agree that she has to stay with her husband and her children. But that's okay, because as quick as you can put your hankie down, in just the scene after next he's going to meet another attractive and interesting woman and everything will be just fine. In the end it's all good for ol' Even Steven.

The reason the things and events in this show don't endure beyond their specific famous scenes is that they can't, because they're the wrong things. Remember your first year algebra and consider factoring: when solving something like 2x + 6y = 8, the first thing you'll do is factor out a two all around and solve the lighter-weight x + 3y = 4 instead; that extra factor of two can be expected from one term to the next, so it contributes nothing to the solution and you can throw it away. What Zemeckis has done is to throw out the variables and keep the factor, so all he has to say is two, two, equals two.

He even has a visual convention—or tic, really—which is intruded repeatedly to emphasize his attraction to the obvious, a sort of pivot-pan. The camera zooms in on Hanks from one side and then swings about 160 degrees around to his other side, so you get to see what's behind him to the left and what's behind him to the right, in case a single angle wasn't going to satisfy you. Practically it's there to give the impression of excitement and motion where there's only torpor and stasis, but it's also the opposite of mise en scène: by swooping past everything around the central figure it declares our lack of interest in all except that obvious figure; call it mise en spin.

All that's obvious in the story gets extreme detail—if someone has been stranded then obviously there was a wreck of some kind, so Zemeckis shows the plane crash in harrowing detail. If the story is about a survivor then someone must have survived, so the escape from the wreck is shown in thrilling detail. It's natural that the eventual reunion with the fiancee will be kind of charged, so that reunion is shown in bodice-ripping detail, and it's only reasonable that she should stay with her husband, so the deciding is covered in weepy detail.

But it's personal and not obvious that Chuck should try to hang himself, so that part is left out; the way for Chuck and Kelly to relate to each other from this point forward is unclear, so that part is left out. All consequences of anything, such as an injury, are contingent, so all those parts are left out too, because those things are too hard, and this movie is about two and two, which both are two. Oh, make it two and a half.

January 17, 2001

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