I was seeing a bit of Cast Away again recently and I realized something. In the opening, Tom Hanks character is essentially doing the Alec Baldwin “motivational speech” from Glengarry Glen Ross, although nicer so you're not supposed to get the idea he's a POS and the rest of the movie is karma. I haven't seen Glengarry Glen Ross, but I know the gist of it and have seen the ABC speech. Here's a rather well off executive flown in to whip workers who are probably worse off than even the bottom for American workers. He's engaged in labor tourism, like Mike Rowe. He works really hard a few days a month and spends the rest of the time managing. He doesn't have to then try and survive on what the people who have to do this all day every day do, and he doesn't have to do this all day every day. They're not flown somewhere else the next day and put up in a hotel, either. And if one of those workers works harder than him he's not going to get chewed out. He's the one doing the whipping. It's at his pace, at the end of the day. At it's broadest, Cast Away is man vs nature, but only in the same sense that A Christmas Carol is man vs ghosts. In fact it more closely resembles A Christmas Carol in that his riding (if not outright abusing) workers put him in this situation. It just has a more ambiguous ending, and the Scrooge here might have gotten a girlfriend but not really learned anything.