“Finch” arrives on Apple TV+ under the banner of Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment – indeed, one of the first things we see is the “E.T. moon” logo – and one of its credited executive producers is frequent Amblin partner Robert Zemeckis. These credits are a tip at the throwback vibe they’re going for; the director is “Game of Thrones” alum Miguel Sapochnik, but he’s going for something of the twinkly magic of Spielberg and Zemeckis’s ‘80s and ‘90s output. This is nothing particularly new; the reanimation of said vibe has, via films like “Super 8” and shows like “Stranger Things,” basically become its own genre (whether the material fits it or not). “Finch” is noteworthy for the addition of another key player of the era: Tom Hanks, who has collaborated several times with both Spielberg and Zemeckis.
Hanks and Zemeckis’s 2000 film “Cast Away” is the first of many reference points, as “Finch” is another film where Hanks is, for much of its running time, the only human being onscreen. We first meet him in a spacesuit, whistling merrily and singing “American Pie,” even though he’s moving through a windy, sand-covered, abandoned wasteland, and stepping over dead bodies in a 99-cent store. At first, it feels like we’re in “I Am Legend” territory, as Hanks’ Finch Weinberg spends his days exploring, extracting valuables, and “clearing” buildings in St. Louis. He does this work methodically, and finds entertainment where can, tearing through town in his dump truck and cheerfully knocking cars out of the way.
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But when he gets back to his air-locked safe space, as he clocks in and goes about his work, the feel is closer to a working-class space movie like “Alien” or “Moon,” even though the strange, inhospitable environment, in this case, is Earth. He studies and analyzes, he digitizes information from books and pamphlets, and he cares for his faithful canine companion, Goodyear. (Cue the “A Boy and His Dog” callbacks.) And he’s built a robot from spare parts, which he soon brings to life; he instructs it of the “four directives,” which are basically Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics, with one more: in his absence, the robot (later named “Jack,” and voiced by Caleb Landry Jones) is to care for Goodyear the dog.
The apocalypse in question, we soon discover, was climate change—a solar flare in the busted ozone layer, to be precise—and its aftermath. “There are holes in the sky, it’s like Swiss cheese,” Finch explains, and the new normal consists of dangerous weather events, many of which are headed Finch’s way simultaneously, resulting in a “super storm” lasting 40 days. So this man, his robots, and his dog climb into his RV and head from St. Louis to San Francisco, with exploits and dangers awaiting them along the way.
This middle section is, basically, a road movie, a riff on the classic boys’ adventure story, with occasional dips into sci-fi and thriller territory. And it’s also a buddy movie, as Finch the loner (“I just work better by myself”) first resists the urge to trust his robot (“Trust will get you killed! Trust no one”) but comes to value and respect him. All the while, Finch’s heavy cough is getting more and more worrisome – he’s sick from exposure to radiation, and getting sicker.
If this all sounds terribly formulaic, well, it is. I’ve already name-checked several clear inspirations for Craig Luck and Ivor Powell’s screenplay, and you’ll probably spot more, and the trouble with this kind of mix-tape moviemaking is that when your film is dominated by echoes, it’s difficult to make your own voice heard. Long stretches of “Finch” are entertaining enough, compelling even, but there’s never a clear sense of what Sapochnik and his team are trying to accomplish, aside from reminding you of other movies you probably liked.
That said, the post-apocalyptic effects are credible (and thus scary), particularly the eerily convincing images of abandoned cities, long fallen into chaos. And “Jeff,” a motion-capture performance by Landry, is something of a marvel; his designers find a way, in his creation and his movements, to make him seem both robot and human at once.
And of course, there is Hanks, whose inherent goodness is such a given, by this point, that we automatically assume he must be doing something noble, and we’re usually right. “Finch” is his second vehicle, after “Greyhound,” that was made pre-pandemic, intended for theatrical release, and instead picked up by Apple TV+. But its portrait of a world taken to extinction not only by tragedy but the worst of human impulses seems strangely inspired by this moment in our history, and his heart-wrenching monologue about a close call with death in a supermarket is given extra poignancy not only by his anguished delivery, but the long shadow of what we’ve seen in the time since it was shot. Tom Hanks is such an avatar for optimism and goodness that the qualities of this character – his heartbreak and vulnerability and resignation to a certain kind of hopelessness – land with greater impact, and he’s so good that when the filmmakers go for the big emotional wallop at the end, they almost pull it off. [B-]
“Finch” arrives on Apple TV+ on November 5.