Tom Hanks was marvelous as Chuck Nolan, the FedEx guy.  He does a superb job being a man whose plane goes down and is lost at sea, washed ashore and island and has to fend for himself for 4 years.  He showed all the emotions you would expect of a person in his predicament.  He befriends a soccor ball and displays human emotion toward an inanimate object that he pretends is human.  It is interesting to see what he comes up with to cook, hunt, and just plain survive.  The beginning goes by fast and you are plummted into a story line with a plane in a storm, and the small crew all die and here...