A man in a post-apocalyptic world builds a robot companion in Finch. Finch Weinberg (Tom Hanks) is one of the few survivors of a solar flare, which destroyed the ozone layer, resulted in uninhabitable levels of ultraviolet radiation. Finch spends his days scavenging the ruins of St. Louis while coming home at night to take care of his dog Goodyear. Suffering from an illness, Finch builds a robot named Jeff (Caleb Landry Jones) to take care of Goodyear when he’s gone. When a very bad storm begins approaching, Finch and Jeff are forced to evacuate with Goodyear and scavenging robot Dewey and travel in a solar-powered RV to San Francisco.
Finch is a sci-fi drama directed by Miguel Sapochnik (Repo Men) about a post-apocalyptic world that has been ravaged by a solar flare, which destroyed the ozone layer and increased temperatures to 150 degrees Fahrenheit. The film stars Tom Hanks as the titular Finch, who has purposely avoided all human contact in the decade since the solar flare since he witnessed how they fight to survive brought out the worst in people. Dying from an unknown illness, Finch ends up building a robot named Jeff, voiced by Caleb Landry Jones (X-Men: First Class), who is sadly not a full mental capacity, since Finch had to evacuate his lab before he was able to finish transferring data into Jeff’s memory. As the two make the trip to San Francisco, Finch has to teach Jeff about what it means to be human.
Finch is a film that is nearly entirely dependent on the performance by Tom Hanks, looking more grizzled than he has ever been, as he spends the entirety as the sole human character, save for a few shown in a flashback, with Hanks acting alongside two robots and a dog. Much of the film involves Finch trying to teach his robot Jeff how to scavenge for food and take care of Finch’s dog Goodyear. The film opts not to delve too much into Finch’s life before the apocalypse and even does not divulge the illness he is slowly dying from, other a brief glance at a book cover suggesting it’s from overexposure to ultraviolet radiation.
Probably the most obvious film to compare Finch to would be Robert Zemeckis’ Cast Away and indeed Zemeckis is involved with the film as an Executive Producer and the film also has the involvement of Steven Spielberg‘s production company Amblin Entertainment. In some ways, Finch can be seen as a throwback to the classic Amblin films from the 1980s, along with other sci-fi family films such as Short Circuit. As such, Finch is a film that I recommend checking out.
