Cast Away

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Recommended: Debate whether capitalism is better than communism

In the movie Cast Away, Chuck Noland says that to turn ones back on time is to commit a sin. In this movie, Chuck’s life revolves around time, and his ability to make more money is directly affected by time. This fact, however, is exactly what is related as a bad thing. Throughout the movie, capitalistic ventures, which require an extreme investment of time, are characterized as evil. The message sent in Cast Away is that we live in a corrupt and morally bankrupt society which is only concerned with the bottom line, but if we all “get back to the basics” and search our souls for what really matters in life, we may have a chance of turning out okay.

Chuck Noland represents the United States in this movie, especially in the former Soviet Union. As hinted when the picture of Lenin is being removed, Russia is still not completely devoid of communism, in which the basic idea is equality (Cast Away). Bring in the American Chuck Noland, who is only concerned with how fast things move (so that FedEx makes an extra dollar), and this society is corrupted. This is revealed quite startlingly in the scene where Chuck pulls a clock out of a FedEx box. The 80 or so hours it took the box to get to Russia is inconsequential to the Russians (Cast Away). They do not know that to effectively “compete” in the marketplace they have to ship faster and faster, and even if they did, they would not care. Still, to Chuck, this is an outrage because he is losing money due to “excess” time. The interpreter even has to make an excuse for Chuck’s behavior because the Russians find it absurd (Cast Away). This all goes to further develop the idea that American democracy is slowly eating away at the ideals of the rest of the world. The movie is re...

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...eals with the fact that fixation on time in order to make money is evil. The World Trade Center represents the financial heart of America, and it is also run on time. It can then be inferred that the people who work in this building could be labeled as evil using the standards that this movie creates. Also, with the title Cast Away, it is implied that these people should be exiled or “gotten rid of” for a period of time. Since these buildings were destroyed and the people killed, one could make the connection that the movie is implying that this event may have been a good thing, which it is not. Nonetheless, that connection could be made by people, which would have caused the makers of the movie to change the title if it had, indeed, come out after September 11, 2001.

Works Cited
Zemeckis, Robert. Cast Away. Feat. Tom Hanks, Helen Hunt. 20th Century Fox. 2000.

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