Corrected entry: At the Russian FedEx Office, Hanks orders everyone to get all the boxes into the "big truck". Actually, as he is working for FedEx, he would know the term is "shuttle".
Corrected entry: In the plane crash scene, Chuck is underwater and activates the self-inflatable life raft. The raft fills with air, and he is propelled to the surface. But a self-inflatable raft uses internal vacuum to pull outside air in. Underwater, it would fill with water. The red thing is not some air container either; it's likely a package of survival goods and is only attached by a tether.
Correction: Inflatable rafts do not "use internal vacuum to pull outside air in." They use compressed gas bottles located within the skin of the raft that are activated by a lanyard, exactly as shown in the scene.
Corrected entry: Near the end of the movie, Kelly says that Chuck's island was about 600 miles south of the Cook Islands, but there isn't anything south of the Cook Islands besides Antarctica.
Correction: THAT'S THE WHOLE POINT! He was on an uncharted island for FOUR YEARS. We've pretty much charted the entire globe by now. It's a fictional island.
Corrected entry: Why is the package that Chuck never opens on a flight from the U.S. to the far east, if it's meant to be delivered to Texas?
Correction: It came from Texas. Chuck brought it back to the place of origin, not destination.
Corrected entry: As the plane hits the water, Chuck falls backward, toward the rear of the plane. This violates the concept of inertia. He actually would have continued traveling forward toward the incoming water.
Correction: Actually he gets thrown back by the force of the water.
Corrected entry: When Chuck tries to get away with his liferaft, it sinks, and the coral pierces his upper leg. Though this is just a fleshwound, it's pretty nasty. He has no medical equipment whatsoever. But when he lies on the raft four years later, when his legs are visible there is not the slightest scar where he was wounded.
Correction: When Chuck is woken up by the plastic "sail" hitting the rocks he goes to take a closer look. If you look very closely you can see that on his left leg is a scar. It's only visible for a few seconds, but it's definitely there.
Corrected entry: Assuming Tom Hanks was going from Memphis to Kaula Lumpur (which I don't believe was actually discussed), the airplane as seen from the inside is either an MD-11 or possibly a DC10 with a glass cockpit. If so, the that route is beyond the range (9768 NM) of either airplane. It is even further to Sydney, Australia so I don't think that is very likely to have happened without a fuel stop, that didn't happen either.
Correction: We don't know that a refuel didn't happen, we just didn't see it on camera because it wouldn't really be interesting.
Corrected entry: A FedEx car is shown clamped next to the Spassky Gate on the Red Square. Cars are not allowed to be parked there at all as a security measure - they'd be towed away, not clamped.
Correction: Usually cars are clamped, and then the tow truck comes to get them.
Corrected entry: All airliners are pressurized in flight to approximately 8000ft, and any item inflated at ground level would have higher pressure, thus when the aircraft is pressurized in flight the difference in the lower cabin pressure and the higher pressure in the inflated item would risk it exploding, for this reason it is a requirement to deflate all items such as footballs and bike tyres before being placed on the flight. For this reason Wilson the football should not have been put on this flight.
Correction: People get away with putting unauthorized items on passenger flights and cargo flights all the time. The fact that Wilson should not have been on the flight does not make it a mistake. Also, the sender may have been unaware of this and the airline would not know the contents of the box.
Corrected entry: When Chuck spears his first crab he holds it up and it shows 6 little legs moving. Chuck then grabs off a leg to eat and it has a huge claw on it. The one he speared did not have claws.
Correction: The crab he spears does have big claws. They are folded against the crabs body. Look close as he turns it over.
Corrected entry: In Cast Away, Tom Hanks calls a ball by its brand name, Wilson. In Big, his child character does the same early on when playing ball with Billy. He calls a ball, Spaulding.
Correction: This is a little too simple to be trivia, especially since it was not Tom Hanks' character saying this in Big.
Corrected entry: When Noland is casually urinating into the ocean late one night we see a light on the horizon. It can only be from a passing ship. Noland doesn't react at all, and it is directly in his line of sight. He couldn't miss it.
Correction: Um, did you watch the rest of the scene? he literally sees the light when he's done urinating and says "ship!" and then yells "help" and shines his flashlight.
Correction: That's the entire point of the scene. When he looks in the direction of the light, it stops, and it's only visible when he's not looking. It's meant as a sad, "missed opportunity" scene.
What absolute nonsense. He is looking straight at it. In fact it is a light from a building on the island used as a filming location (Monuriki, Fiji) that the post production crew forgot to paint out, making it two different types of film mistake.
Corrected entry: The orientation of the plane is all wrong. Hanks goes into the bathroom, which is located aft of a crew door, and against the front of the cargo area. The bathroom on all the wide body aircraft (Airbuses, DC-10, MD-11) is located between the cockpit and the jumpseat area.
Correction: On some MD-11s the lav is located aft of the entry door 1R.
Corrected entry: Chuck's plane was supposed to have gone down in 1995 and he was on the island for just under 4 years, but when he is talking to Kelly in her house about the Tennessee Titans, she says they "were in the Super Bowl last year." Even if the crash happened in December of '95, he'd have been home by the end of '99, a minimum of a few months prior to the Titans Super Bowl appearance (which was actually in January of 2000 - Super Bowl XXIV).
Correction: He did in fact crash in December 1995, they were eating a Christmas dinner when he was called away for work. When he writes his farewell note on the rocks, he states he was on the island 1500 days(give or take),which is over 4 years. By the time he is rescued and returns to America, it could easily be spring of 2000. Super Bowl, as stated, would have been in late January. So he just missed it.
In that case wouldn't she say they win the Super Bowl this year??
No. Usually once the season has ended, the last superbowl would be referred to as last year's superbowl, as it belongs to the previous year's season.
No. Because it was the super bowl of last year's season.
Corrected entry: It is clear when Tom Hanks is on top of the island, and when he sees the dead body, and also when he walks around the island, that the fringing reef does not extend all the way round the island. There is therefore no need to launch the raft into the breaking waves, it would be much easier to launch the raft at a place on the island where there are no breakers to contend with. (You can also see this in an aerial shot of the island on page 84 of the book "Nomads of the Wind").
Correction: There could be other reasons for other launching sites to be unusable. An inaccessible or particularly rocky beach, for example, or prevailing winds. He couldn't sail the raft into the wind to escape the island.
Correction: He pretty much had to launch the raft from the location where he built it. It was heavy, the island does not appear to be flat or have open spaces, so he could not have lugged it and all the supplies to a different location. Even if he could, it would risk damaging it. He built the raft where he had the best access to the needed materials.
Corrected entry: When Tom Hanks is on top of the island and he sees the dead body, look at the water level. It's very low and the body isn't floating at all. But when Tom Hanks is down with the body it's floating and the water level is much higher.
Correction: It would have taken him some time to get down from the top of the island, and in the mean time the tide would have come in. This would explain why the water level is much higher and why the body floats.
Corrected entry: In the scenes 4 years after Chuck has been on the island, we see he has grown his hair out and his beard is very long. What is out of place is his mustache is remarkably well-groomed. Whiskers don't grow evenly, and unless he had some scissors or something else to trim with, it's very unlikely that his mustache would be so evenly distributed around his mouth.
Correction: Actually, anyone with a mustache can tell you that it's no great feat to keep those reasonably well trimmed just by biting the ends off - and you would, unless you like them trailing in your mouth all the time.
Corrected entry: Towards the end of the film, when Helen Hunt runs after Tom Hanks, she shouts "Jack! Jack!" It's not Chuck by any stretch of the imagination. (02:00:30)
Correction: I've watched and listed to the scene a number of times, and read the transcript. She says "Chuck", not "Jack." It almost falls in line with the McGurk effect, so it's possible to hear "Jack", but to state that's what she says is not correct. Very rarely have I seen a valid mistake regarding an actor calling a character the wrong name. It's almost always someone hearing something wrong, which isn't the actor's fault.
Correction: Note that the CH and J sounds at the beginning of a word are nearly identical. Kelly is actually saying "Chuck", but apparently because she is both running and shouting it comes out "Ch-YA-uck", so that anyone within earshot named either "Chuck" or "Jack" would turn around to see who was paging them. And on the final, third utterance she is saying "Chuck", with no YA meme.
Maybe they sound identical but it still count as a character error.
Corrected entry: The scene where he just got a fire going and is throwing logs on the fire on the beach, notice how calm the water is. Every other shot of the water has huge waves just to leave the island. Why didn't he just leave from the beach he had the fire on?
Correction: Because he didn't have a raft. The last one was damaged on his first attempt.
Corrected entry: After the plane crash, when Tom Hanks is in the raft, he falls asleep and awakes only when the raft hits a rock on the island and a section of the raft deflates. How did the raft get over all those gigantic waves on the reef without capsizing? (Especially with the high waves that would occur after a storm.) Did Tom sleep right through it all?
Correction: Both situations are entirely plausible. The boat not capsizing is because these rafts are designed to skim the top of the water, riding the highest swells. Out farther in the water, even fairly close to shore, the waves just swell for the most part, and don't break like they do on shore which could make the ride quite nauseating, but not necessarily dangerous. As for the sleep, a defense mechanism of the human psyche is to induce sleep in some very stressful situations. Even though scared and alone, the swells alone could have been enough to lull him to sleep.
Correction: And as the screenwriter probably guessed - correctly - the film's audience would not consist solely of FedEx employees. He therefore used a term we would understand, rather than industry jargon.