History Headscratchers / CastAway

Throughout the entire movie we never see nor hear any reference to any of Chuck’s family. The Christmas dinner is with coworkers, then when he gets off the island he flies back with a friend/coworker. No family greets him at the airport, no family is with him at the hotel, nobody goes with him to deliver the package in Texas. You’d think if he had parents, siblings, cousins, ANY family they’d want to be with him!?!

** It clearly starts as a way of entertaining himself and then by the end of the four year period he's gotten way too in to it and its become a kind of security blanket. Its not like we're meant to see it as him NOT going crazy but its likely a defense mechanism he developed to keep him from losing all hope.

* He probably just boiled some ocean water to separate it from the salt. However--this requires a way to catch the steam to form water, and that's a bit complicated for a guy with no pot.
* There are plants on the island so there must be fresh water. He might have to dig it out, but it's there.
* The most probable immediate source was rainwater. He was in an area that rained quite often, so he likely created a gathering pool from the remains of the raft to gather, and used the coconut shells as storage. In fact, this was what he did while sailing.

[[WMG: He buried Albert's body fully clothed]]

All that fabric, the wallet with plastic credit cards, and Al's belt would have all been pretty helpful.
* I'm guessing at the time he didnt think to pick pocketing a corpse, or wanting to see a deadman's junk.
* Also, at that point in the movie he hadn't settled into his Robinson Crusoe persona yet. He wasn't thinking about what he'd need to survive, he was just flailing around trying to think of something to do. By the time he learned how to forage properly and realized how useful Albert's clothes would be they would have been pretty stanky, and probably not safe for him to handle.

[[WMG: Why? Why did Wilson have to float on?]]
* Why couldn't they make it so that he didn't? My God, that was the saddest part of the movie. The saddest part of any movie ever, at least for me.
** It says something for Tom Hanks's acting skills that he can make us teary watching a man losing a volleyball.
** The fact that it's so sad ''is the whole point''. What were you expecting? That he would wash up on dry land and spend the rest of his life talking to that damn volleyball? That would've totally killed the mood of the movie.
*** "Kelly, I'm back, I love you, and this is my volleyball: Wilson!"

* The arrival of the cargo ship is rightly labeled a DeusExMachina on the main page--it seems quite improbable that Chuck's tiny raft would be spotted by a ship of that size. But recall that the scene begins with Chuck being splashed by the spray of a whale's blowhole, and it becomes easier to imagine crewmembers, idly whale watching on deck, having their eyes drawn to Chuck's position by the whale surfacing nearby.
** The way he was ignoring the splashing and noise makes it seem that he thinks another whale pod is passing by.

[[WMG:The suicide dummy]]
Why does the fact that the test rope was too long mean he couldn't hang himself? Surely finding that out was the point of testing the length in the first place?
* The rope wasn't too long. The tree he tied it to broke in half when he dropped the dummy off the cliff. If Chuck (who presumably weighed a lot more than the dummy) had tried to hang himself from that tree it probably would have snapped the tree right off and he would have fallen onto the rocks below, where he could have broken his legs or his back (or both). And without any way to get back to his shelter he would have suffered a slow and torturous death from exposure. Afterwards he was too spooked to go back up there again.
* The length of the rope is actually is significant in this matter. A longer drop means more momentum which in turns means a greater force put on the tree branch. A shorter rope could very well have made the difference between a quick death from hanging and a slow death from exposure.
* The rope would require a minimum length to snap his neck, as opposed to slowly strangulate him. It seems he could not find a length of rope that would do that while still leaving the tree intact.