CAST AWAY 2000 ROBERT ZEMECKIS In the wake of Survivor, where some brave and hardy game show contestants were "cast away" on an island that was also home to a small town with a hotel bar featuring satellite TV, it's worth asking whether in 2000 (or 1995, as per the story) any unpopulated Pacific islands the size of that where Tom Hanks's Fed Ex manager Chuck Noland ends up in Cast Away even exist. And if one does, would it be possible to live there for 4 years in the age of satellite surveillance after a high-profile plane crash without anyone noticing. But if you buy this overarching anachronism, along with the inevitable suspension of disbelief necessary for any action movie, namely that the protagonist never obeys the laws of probability and just plain dies, then otherwise Zemeckis turns in a relatively plausible rendering of what the physical experience of such an ordeal would be. Tom Hanks is both a genuine lardbelly exec and later an actual shaggy-but-sinewy slender outdoorsman, and supplies his usual dose of earnest everyguyness. Other than the fortuitous washing-up with Noland of some of the Fed Ex packages from his plane, which provides him with a potpourri of modern materials with which to jump start his recreation of civilization, his efforts do proceed slowly, with some false starts, to the script's credit. But the sentimental frame story of Noland's life with his fiancee Kelly (played with typical insipidity by Helen Hunt, who also beams blandly in a locket picture Noland treasures on the island) before and after his adventure places Cast Away firmly in the realm of Hollwood schmaltz.