Finch
Tom Hanks teams up with a dog and a robot in a post-apocalyptic future.
Goodyear and Tom Hanks
It’s the end of the world and there’s only one man left alive. Or is there? If you are going to mount a film around a single actor, you could do a lot worse than Tom Hanks. Not only does he exhibit a sort of Everyman quality, but he’s also got some smarts, a wry sense of humour and has a twinkle in his eye that suggests hidden depths. Here, Tom Hanks plays Finch – or Finch Weinberg, as we discover later – who we first meet in a dust storm wearing a biohazard suit and singing ‘American Pie’ to himself with a nonchalant air. We last saw Hanks in News of the World, in which one of the most memorable scenes saw him enveloped in another dust storm, in which he becomes separated from his twelve-year-old ward. But that was in 1870.
Here, we are in the future, when a solar flare has destroyed the earth’s ozone layer and in the process wiped out most of the human population. Hanks plays a robotics engineer who lives in a high-tech subterranean retreat with his dog Goodyear and an automaton in the WALL-E mould. With his vast library and collection of old songs (Perry Como, The Specials and, of course, Don McLean), he seems happy enough in his own company: he has never really been a people person. However, Finch is working on a new, more humanoid robot, designed to look after his dog – because Finch knows that his own days are numbered (radiation poisoning will do that to a guy). With the weather conditions in St Louis, Missouri, becoming more unstable, Finch knows he must move West – and to a higher altitude – in his battered old RV. So he and Goodyear and their two automated companions set off on the road towards an uncertain future…
The last time Tom Hanks found himself stuck on his own – on an uninhabited island in Cast Away – he befriended a volleyball and called it Wilson. Under Robert Zemeckis’s direction, the film became a massive success and landed Hanks an Oscar nomination. Here, Zemeckis takes a back seat (he is executive producer) and hands the directorial reins to Miguel Sapochnik (Game of Thrones). A meditation on the human condition, as well as a look at our place on the planet and our relationship with lower life forms, Finch, the film, is pushing the limits of sentimentality. Think about it: Tom Hanks as a dying man with a loyal pooch and a robot (the latter becoming more sentient by the minute). Even so, it is Tom Hanks, and the film is superlatively crafted, and if one isn’t too jaded by the current proliferation of single-character movies (The Guilty, Oxygen, Stanley: A Man of Variety, All is Lost, Buried, etc), the scenic views of New Mexico make for a handsome distraction.
JAMES CAMERON-WILSON
Cast: Tom Hanks, Lora Martinez-Cunningham, Oscar Avila, Marie Wagenman, and the voice of Caleb Landry Jones.
Dir Miguel Sapochnik, Pro Jacqueline Levine, Daniel Maze, Kevin Misher, Ivor Powell and Jack Rapke, Ex Pro Robert Zemeckis, Craig Luck and Miguel Sapochnik, Screenplay Craig Luck and Ivor Powell, Ph Jo Willems, Pro Des Tom Meyer, Ed Tim Porter, Music Gustavo Santaolalla, Costumes Kurt and Bart, Sound Brandon Jones.
Amblin Entertainment/Reliance Entertainment/Walden Media/ImageMovers/Misher Films-Apple TV+.
115 mins. USA/UK. 2021. Rel: 5 November 2021. Available on Apple TV Plus. Cert. 12
