Tom Hanks’ Robo-Road Trip Makes the Most of Forgettable Finch
As climate chaos continues to spin out of control, the populace has begun splitting into a few groups. In the U.S., researchers initially dubbed these groups the Six Americas. By now, it’s down to about three: Those that’d prefer to keep their heads in the sand, those desperately shouting for change, and those profiting off of inaction at the expense of our global future. The post-apocalyptic Finch takes place in such a future, dominated by extreme weather and hot enough to pop popcorn off a stray hubcap, watching a man reckon with his choices as he’s confronted with mortality.
There’s plenty of sand, and if it wasn’t for his dog, you’d think Finch (Tom Hanks) would happily dip his dome under the dunes. But like many Last Man on Earth stories, ranging from Harlan Ellison to Fallout—from I Am Legend to Mary Shelley and Stephen King—a dog can be worth everything once civilization has fallen. Finch and its fatherly interests in teaching a robot (Caleb Landry Jones) to survive in order for it to help a dog survive, might just be another drop in this particular sci-fi bucket, but its overachieving performances and FX (and uneasy relationship to our present) at least allows it moments of novelty in the subgenre’s long and crowded legacy.
Directed by Miguel Sapochnik, Finch (which used to have the much better name BIOS) so familiarly slots into our cultural idea of a post-apocalypse that it’s almost depressing. You could get sidetracked and spiral just thinking about the number of scripts that’ve been written, shopped around, and pushed into production by hungry execs looking to capitalize on audiences’ anxiety. It’s not that it’s completely pessimistic (these stories almost all end with bittersweet hope), but that it’s such a lackluster creative response to these fears. Cars are strewn in the street, but not so densely as to be expensive or unsightly. The color palette is a bleak, sunburnt orange-brown. Survival means rugged individualism, but what if…people overcame their distrust and worked together? It’s not particularly engaging, even with the one or two premise tweaks separating the Quiet Places from The Walking Deads. And they all seem to open with people hunting through a grocery store for a single can of food.
The first script from Craig Luck and Ivor Powell (the latter of which was a Ridley Scott producer) isn’t the most elegant thing in the world. Finch is another isolationist survivor, a dweeby mole man engineer who made it fine on his own, thank you very much. Except now he’s dying and he’s got to leave his bunker. An early moment sees Finch reading a book titled The Effects of Exposure to Ionizing Radiation, which I had assumed was the post-apocalyptic version of the Victorian blood-in-the-hanky until the film proved that trope, like cockroaches, will outlive society as we know it. Finch’s RV is similarly stocked with some of the most on-the-nose mixtapes to grace a soundtrack. And Hanks is also asked to deliver a handful of doofy anecdotes—you know, the kind of stories characters tell in response to a simple question—which he only manages to pull off because he remains one of the most compelling and empathetic actors we’ve got. But it’s on the other side of these anecdotes, when the movie isn’t building its world but settling into its interpersonal dynamic, where it finds its strength.
Jones’ robot, who names himself Jeff, is everything for Finch. Taking heavily from the design of Boston Dynamics’ Atlas, with more exposed guts and rusty coloring to signify its DIY origins, Jeff is a marvel to watch. His massive weight, imperfect movement and physicalized curiosity all feel totally natural in the film’s world, specifically next to Hanks. These spectacular effects and the dual performances from Hanks and Jones (Finch’s observation and reaction to his janky Astro Boy is just as important as Jones’ amusingly off-kilter deliveries and posture) makes Jeff endearing rather than cloying, pulling off the charming alpha release version of a precocious child character. Though he sounds a bit like Microsoft Borat, Jeff is no Chappie.