6. What Was In The Package In Cast Away?
As far as unanswered movie questions go, one of the biggest is all too often forgotten. In 2000’s Cast Away, Chuck Nolan, a FedEx businessman, finds himself stranded on a desert island. Many of the FedEx packages that wash ashore help Chuck to survive and maintain his sanity during his isolation. However, it’s the one that he doesn’t open that proves most useful. It gives Chuck something to hope for: one day, he hopes to return it to its intended recipient.
Throughout the film, Chuck looks after the unopened package, and after finally making his way back to civilisation, he safely delivers it. He leaves a note explaining that it saved his life, then walks away. But what was in the package?
It turns out that this was left deliberately ambiguous, as the original script did reveal the package’s contents. It supposedly contained some homemade salsa and a letter from a wife to her estranged husband. Kind of anti-climactic, really. As the whole point of the package is that it represents Chuck’s hope of escaping the island, we guess the contents weren’t really that important anyway.