But once Chuck is aboard a FedEx plane flying over the Pacific, an escalating sense of dread takes over as the aircraft gives a warning shudder. ''Cast Away'' doesn't begin working its spell until its introductory scenes of its harried hero and his fiancee are out of the way. Videotapes become ropes for an escape raft, and the netting in a fancy dress a fishing net. A pair of figure skates becomes both a knife and a tool for removing an infected tooth in an excruciating scene of do-it-yourself dentistry. The volleyball is one of many practical uses Chuck is able to make from the washed-up items (many of them Christmas presents) in FedEx packages that at first seem useless but become essential survival tools. Anyone who recalls being a very young child and clutching a doll that embodies comfort and companionship in times of loneliness and insecurity will relate to the wrenching scenes in which Chuck clings to Wilson for emotional support. Painting a face (in his own blood) on a white Wilson volleyball extracted from a FedEx package that washes up on shore, he turns Wilson (as he calls the ball) into a fellow survivor, confidant and collaborator in an escape plan. The screenplay's conceptual master stroke has Chuck revert to childhood through the creation of an imaginary companion so he can survive psychically. If his wound-up, globe-trotting character, who early in the film is shown haranguing Russian employees at a FedEx depot in Moscow, isn't exactly like you and me in his background and tastes (he happens to be an Elvis Presley fanatic), he embodies enough parts of other people to be utterly recognizable. Hanks portrays a spirited Everyman, at once deeply likable and profoundly ordinary. Ultimate isolation, the movie reminds us, doesn't have a soundtrack except what the environment churns up along with the ringing in our ears, our heartbeats and the voices chattering in our minds. Hanks are the grunts and howls of a man exerting himself to stay alive against a backdrop of the roaring ocean and the wind eerily whistling outside the cave Chuck adopts as a shelter. The most devastating sequences, instead of flooding us with music, suspend the soundtrack and forgo even language to allow the sounds of nature to take over.
It also knows when to turn down the volume. ''Cast Away'' also has its quotient of technological trickery, but one of the movie's wonders is that everything looks and feels so remarkably real. The earlier film huffed and puffed to evoke a similarly elemental struggle in the traditional Hollywood ways, with strenuously grandiose music and oversize, patently unrealistic computer-generated special effects. ''Cast Away'' is everything this year's other man-against-nature blockbuster, ''The Perfect Storm,'' was not. At its best, ''Cast Away,'' like ''Titanic,'' awes us with its sheer oceanic sweep and its cosmic apprehension of human insignificance.
But even in the wobbly narrative bookends that hold a love story, interrupted by disaster, there are flashes of a deeper metaphysical poignancy. Back on the mainland, however, it turns more formulaic and corny. When ''Cast Away'' is the farthest from civilization, it is as compelling a cinematic adventure as any Hollywood has produced. Just in time for dinner, however, we're whisked back to safety and to tables piled high with supermarket goodies and a life that oddly and sadly seems banal and superfluous compared to what has gone before. We remain stranded there just long enough to be given a deep, salty gulp of what it's like to have to restart civilization from scratch. With a bravura mastery of tone and timing, ''Cast Away'' sweeps us out to sea and washes us ashore on a tiny deserted island in the Pacific. And in the heart-stopping ocean and desert-island scenes that constitute the core of ''Cast Away,'' Tom Hanks, in collaboration with the director Robert Zemeckis and the screenwriter William Broyles Jr., bring those visions thrillingly and hauntingly to life. It's like standing on the edge of a cliff and imagining that fatal leap into the unknown. WHICH of us, while sitting at the edge of the ocean and gazing toward the horizon, hasn't shivered to imagine being drawn out to sea, getting lost and ending up a tiny forgotten speck in the middle of nowhere, shouting at the sky? As potentially panic-inducing as this vision may be, there's also something alluring about it.