Movie Endings Explained – Cast Away (video)

Last Updated on July 30, 2021

Movie endings, they're usually pretty straight forward right? Everything pays off, the main characters learn something, and our heroes ride off into the sunset. Sometimes though, we don't get the typical ending from a movie, we get something much more nuanced, complex and open ended. The kind of endings that leave things up in the air for all of us to debate and theorise on until we're blue in the face. With Movie Endings Explained, we aim to delve into some of the more ambiguous and mysterious endings to films that have left audiences scratching their heads for years, and to attempt to explain them. In most cases, a definitive answer isn't really there, so we definitely want to hear from YOU on how you interpret the various endings we'll be discussing with this series.

This time we look at the 2000 desert island drama CAST AWAY from director Robert Zemeckis (BACK TO THE FUTURE, FORREST GUMP) starring Tom Hanks as Chuck Noland, a FedEx systems engineer who ends up marooned on an uninhabited island in the Pacific Ocean. While the end of the film didn't exactly leave people scratching their heads, there was a burning, unanswered question. Chuck kept a FedEx package that had washed ashore on the island unsealed for the four years he was stranded, and at the film's climax, he returns it to the sender. We never get to find out what was inside the package, and whether it was important or not. That's kind of the point, as the package served as more of a driving point for Chuck's character and his survival on the island. But all the same, we look into what was really inside the package, the significance of the angel wings symbol scrawled on the box and what Tom Hanks himself thought of the movie's coda!