Finch
Year: 2021
Rating: PG-13
Length: 115 minutes / 1.92 hours
As time goes on, one starts to wonder if all the best post-apocalyptic stories have already been told. With the current state of the world looking more depressing with each passing year, many visions of dystopia from years past are coming true, while stories of our near future are looking a lot more post-apocalyptic. Finch (2021) fits into this latter category but only has a few newer twists to this common problem: how do humans survive on a planet that is no longer hospitable toward life?
Visually, I was most impressed by “Jeff” (Caleb Landry Jones), the humanoid robot Finch (Tom Hanks) builds to ensure his dog Goodyear has a caretaker. Of course, movies like Chappie (2015) have shown that CG artists figured out how to do this well over five years ago. Regardless, it’s still a visual feat and treat to see realistic-looking CG robots in movies like this. I can also appreciate that Finch shows the creation of a self-sufficient Artificial Intelligence. Many sci-fi films gloss over this portion of AI development, but Finch emphasizes that it’s not as easy as just uploading all of human knowledge into a machine and pressing the “on” button.
While the ending seems a little obvious from the outset—which somewhat lessens its emotional impact—it seems unnecessary, given how long humans and animals can live on such a desolate version of Earth. Furthermore, the whole “Earth is a desolate wasteland” sci-fi trope seems so tired and overdone at this point. I’d much rather see characters overcoming the impossible odds of being stranded on alien planets, like in The Martian (2015). Sure, this movie has Tom Hanks in it, but if it’s the same dystopian survival narrative that’s been given to us dozens of times by now, does it really matter?
Tom Hanks in the same old Earth environmental dystopia, I give Finch 3.5 stars out of 5.
1/2
