Cast Away

It has been a long time since I wanted to see “Cast Away“. Today I finally got my hands on that film and I couldn’t even wait until Olga will wake up. Watched it alone. I am glad to report that it wasn’t a disappointment.

IMDB rating: 7.3
My rating: 9.0
Celebrity highlights: great acting and production by Tom Hanks with directorship of Robert Zemeckis. Helen Hunt was involved in a couple of significant scenes.

As I have already mentioned – the film is great.

It has an interesting story, which is actually a mix of two well-known ideas. The first storyline is about affect that few years of living on an uninhabitted island can make on any human being. Appreciation of basic things like water, fire, food, and medicine brought to attention as well. The second storyline is about the drama of love. If there were two people in love and one of them disappeared in the airplane crash, then how would that affect the live of the second person. Now, the beauty of these two ideas brought together is in giving both of these a slight depth and perspective. The only thing pushing the guy to stay alive while on the island is the love for his woman. Luckily he even has a photograph of her all the time with him. When he manages to escape and get back to her, he finds her in an interesting state – she still loves him and hopes that he is alive. That is not all though. She is married to another guy and has a kid. How do you solve the situation like that? How would you feel in the shoes of any of these two people? Would you do anything differently? These are the questions the movie made me think about…

But this film is not only about the story. The story is all good, but the rest of the film is as good. The photography part of it was amazing. In general, nice looking island with white sand beach, palms, and a mountain, all surrounded by a blue ocean is a very widely photographed theme. Yet, there are some fresh ideas and points of view on this beauty in the film.

I also found the soundworks interesting. Most of the time, while Hanks is alone on the island, there is no music at all. The sillence of background increases the effect of lonelyness dramatically. It also makes the happenings on the screen much closer to the audience. More believable, if you wish.

On the down side, I didn’t particularly liked the way Russia is shown in the beginning. Moscow is shown like a big village (which it is, but in a different sense). It’s been years since big cities were all covered in foreign brand names, with foreign cars on the streets, and people wearing colors other than black. FedEx is displayed as the only stream of color and life into presumably grey routine life of people in Moscow. This is wrong. It looks wrong. And it feels wrong. Technically though this part was perfect. Not like the end.

I found the ending to be somewhat unfinished. Not film-wise, but technically. It felt like they were finishing the movie in a hurry. Strange lighting, traditional angles, smashed dialogues.

Still, the film is very strong, pleasant to look at, and provides something to think about. Hanks played really amazing. I suspect that he had to go through some serious body transformations during the course of the film. He had to gain and lose a lot of weight, as well as make his muscles and hair look very different. There were some changes to him that required more than just a good make-up.

This movie is not something that I would be watching the second time any time soon, but I am sure glad that I have finally seen it. Strongly recommended stuff.

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