By Doug Anderson
If there was anything more offputting than the prospect of being marooned with Oliver Reed - as Amanda Donohue was in Nicolas Roeg's Castaway (1986) - it would surely be enduring a protracted sojourn on a desert island with Tom Hanks.
Chuck Noland (Hanks) is a FedEx troubleshooter whose rigid sense of discipline and punctuality are perfectly deployed in his work but bound to gnaw away at him should he find himself with too much time on his hands. Which is what happens when he miraculously survives a plane crash and finds himself marooned on a remote Pacific atoll smaller than Bikini (which, these days, like the G-string cossie, is almost nothing atoll. Sorry!).
There's something to be said for the proposition that modern man, imbued with a phase-locked corporate mind-set as a survival imperative, has lost the ability to survive in any realistic terms, but while Hanks strives hard to make Noland credible, the weight of leaden symbolism is too much here.