As part of the TRAVELS & TRAVAILS series: 

Travels, Travails, & Tom Hanks

Cast Away

2000, 144 minutes

As long as people have ventured beyond the horizon, there have been calamities–whether in shipwrecks or more recently air crashes, with each generation having its own stranding and survival narrative. At the turn of the 21st century, director Robert Zemeckis offered a film where the hectic yet comfortable routines of Western Civilization come to a grinding halt in a trackless patch of the South Pacific. Tom Hanks plays a workaholic systems analyst for Fed Ex who travels the world looking for inefficiency in the delivery chain. On return from an assignment in Malaysia his plane goes down in a storm. Swept by the currents to an uninhabited island, he is the only survivor, his only tools coming from the Fed Ex packages washing ashore. For all the talk of an ever-smaller world, Hanks’ character quickly realizes how vast the Pacific is and that he is on his own for the foreseeable future–his survival depending on how well he can shift from his corporate skill-sets to a Paleolithic life.

Please Note--This film is RATED PG-13, with profanity, an air disaster, fatalities, injuries, privation, weight loss, and a deep abiding friendship with a volleyball.