“Coconut milk is a natural laxative. That’s something Gilligan never told us.”

A decent variation on the Robinson Crusoe archetype sandwiched between two cleverly scripted segments of an undercooked love story, Cast Away is carried entirely by the craft of director Robert Zemeckis and the screen presence of isolated star Tom Hanks. Besides a meme-friendly volleyball that becomes a fetishized stand-in for human companionship and the washed up corpse of a colleague, FedEx executive Chuck Noland (Hanks) is all alone on an uninhabited island for two-thirds of the picture, washing ashore the day after a company plane crashes in the South Pacific on the way to Malaysia.

That Hanks is able to hold audience interest all by his lonesome for such a duration by trial-and-erroring his way through half-remembered boy scout lessons is commendable, but his efforts are undermined by a script from William Broyles Jr. that seems too concerned with fitting the primitive survival story into a standard feel-good movie arc. The film’s saving grace in this regard is that it’s presented in a way that refrains from forcing a perspective on the audience. It’s incredibly involving and memorable and yet it leaves the viewer in a thoughtful state rather than an uplifted one by virtue of Zemeckis’s creative instincts and an emotionally turbulent denouement involving a fiancée (Helen Hunt) who never quite believed her beloved was dead but couldn’t keep her life on pause for four years.

Anyway, imagine if the real FedEx was as concerned about delivering packages on-time and intact as they are in this movie?