By Matt Soergel
Florida Times-Union

The opening credits give the first clue that the Tom Hanks-goesRobinson-Crusoe movie might not be what you'd expect.

First comes the word Cast. Then there's a crucial pause. Only then does the second word appear: Away.

It's a deliberate decision. In Cast Away, Hanks, quite possibly America's favorite movie star, is not going to be a cute castaway, having jolly adventures on an island paradise.

Oh, but it does look like paradise, with great surf and beautiful scenery (it was filmed in Fiji) and plentiful food, once you learn how to get it. But it's no romp, no sunny frolic: Hanks is utterly, crushingly alone, as a daring, splendid and long middle sequence on the island makes clear.

Director Robert Zemeckis, who teamed with Hanks on Forrest Gump, films the island scenes with no musical score: There's just the wind, the surf, the birds, the coconuts landing in the jungle.

It's a brilliant decision that emphasizes just how cast away he has become. There are no cannibals. No pirates. No sharks. No cute animal friends. And there's nothing for him to do but to find some way to survive.

He has been utterly cast away from humanity, and that's both a physical state and a mental one: Not a single person knows that he thinks, that he breathes, that he mourns.

He's a ghost.

I must confess here that some may be bored by this hour-and-a-half sequence. It's austere, morose, patient -- hardly the typical offerings you get in a blockbuster. Cast Away, wisely, makes no concessions: Besides, there's always Vertical Limit in the next theater if you crave stunts and thrills.

Cast Away opens with some well-paced scenes in which we see FedEx executive Chuck Noland (Hanks), haranguing the hapless FedExers in Moscow's Red Square. "Time rules over us with no mercy," he warns, a little heavy-handedly. "We can never turn our back on time."

After snuggling over Christmas with his fiancee (Helen Hunt), he boards a FedEx plane to Asia, where more problems have cropped up. The plane, though, crashes in the Pacific, in a terrifying sequence that's one of the best action sequences of the year.

He makes it to a deserted island. He wakes up. Yells for company. Finds none. Then he begins opening the few FedEx packages that have washed up with him. Ice skates on a tropical island? They could be useful. A party dress? It could help feed him. Videotapes -- without a VCR or even electricity? You never know.

Production on Cast Away was halted a year for Hanks to lose weight -- up to 60 pounds -- to play his island survivor. That's a famous story already. But his performance is more than just weight loss: Even his stance, the way he walks, the way he cocks his head at the world, have changed.

Hanks underplays nicely: There are some dramatic, wrenching scenes written for him, but his true loneliness shows best when his face is at its most composed, its most blank.

Scene after scene in Cast Away is stunning, especially in the movie's later going. That's to be expected in a Zemeckis movie, given his track record.

Gump, after all, was far more than the simplistic morality tale its deriders and some of its supporters saw it as. And Contact was far underrated, one of the best science-fiction films ever made -- a speculative story that was far more than the typical sci-fi movie, which is usually just a Western set in outer space.

Cast Away is up with his best, though one has to wonder if he had any hand in the terrible trailers, which gave away far too much of the movie. No matter. Just in case you haven't seen them, we won't say more.

But we will say that Cast Away is remarkably steady in its final act, a section that could have been its undoing. It's clever, restrained and affecting.

And stick around for Alan Silvestri's score during the ending credits, in which lonely, mournful strings fade out to the lapping of ocean waves before coming to life again, only to be overtaken once more by the waves.

It's a beautiful way to end this tale.