It’s Tom Hanks, a little weatherbeaten but still giving off that cozy glow of his, befriending a robot of the title character’s creation as they traverse an inhospitable land faintly recognizable as our own Earth.
There are, rather curiously and maybe entirely intentionally, some parallels to be drawn with Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, about a man and a boy on a brutal odyssey across a ruined America.
Those companions are actually two whole robots: a wee wordless zoomer who brings to mind the lovelorn machine from Wall-E, and a far more sentient electronic being, eventually named Jeff, who is given voice and, in a motion-capture performance, body by Caleb Landry Jones.
It’s an agreeably modest premise for a movie, especially at a time when so many special-effects laden films seem duty bound to drench themselves in complex mythology.
As long as we’re making comparisons to other things, Finch is also reminiscent of last year’s The Midnight Sky, in which a dying George Clooney treks across a frozen expanse on a mission of triage, trying to rescue at least one small thing as humanity enters its final stage of collapse.
We’ve seen such tableaux before, but there is enough variance and texture in Finch to distinguish it, especially because we’ve never encountered Hanks in such an environment.
As Jeff, Landry Jones does a funny robot voice that gradually settles into something more human, while the mannerisms he presumably adapted for his motion-capture work have a convincingly mechanical jerk and stutter.
Knowing that Finch was at one time destined for the big screen only adds to the film’s doleful aura, the presiding sense of a once glittering thing lost to the tumult and wear of time.
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