Finch

CinemaSerf

7/10

3/27/2022

OK, first things first - original this isn't. It is an amalgam of many road trip and robot movies that we have all seen many times before. That said, it is maybe the first actual robot road movie I think I have ever seen, and Tom Hanks and his metallic sidekick "Jeff" - along with their dog, make quite an entertaining fist of it. The world has been exposed to massive radiation and he appears to be the sole survivor. With an incredible storm approaching his home, he constructs his new friend and the three make for San Francisco in his heavily adapted motorhome. It's a well paced affair, this, and Hanks (who is definitely not my favourite actor) turns in quite an engaging performance as gradually he and "Jeff" begin to learn from each other - for better or worse. There is the sparing use of flashback to give us an indication of what happened to his family, and of how he ended up in his predicament, and as their journey progresses the film offers us a perspective on just what being "human" might mean as he gradually realises that all is not well. It is probably twenty minutes too long, the establishment scenes are unnecessarily extensive but, though not a great film, Tom Hanks invests just enough to keep it in the right gear most of the time.

**Good but lacks flashback method** It smells like a (cast away 2000) movie. The film was directed by Miguel Sapochnik, and the majority of his works were series that had wide fame, one of the best of them being directed by 6 of Game of Thrones, and the best episode he directed was Battle of the Bastards. The story of the movie is about a man who lives alone on the planet with a dog, where he invented a robot to take care of the dog if he died or something bad happened to him. The film talks about humanity and respect for whoever you talk to, even if you are talking to a robot made of iron sheets. Tom Hanks' performance was brilliant and the dialogues with the robots were entertaining. I liked the dog's relationship with Tom Hanks and the robot was an influential character. His performance was different from the robots that appeared in other artworks. He was argumentative, talkative, and had a strong personality. Yes, he regrets anything that Finch doesn't like, but does what he likes and then say sorry to Finch. The negatives of the film could have added additional dialogue sentences that attract the viewer. It would have been better if the flashback method had been used. I wanted to know Finch's old lifestyle, what he was doing, what happened to the world and the people.

Tom Hanks builds a robot to keep his dog alive after he's gone, and the film spends less time on the apocalypse than on what that says about him. Jeff never talks about Goodyear directly, everything he does, the paranoia, the rules, the overprotective route-planning, is really about a man who has already decided he's going to die and is trying to outsource his love. That's a smarter setup than the trailer let on. The dust storms are the best thing in it. Long, quiet, orange-lit stretches where a dead gas station or an empty Route 66 diner feels lived-in instead of set-decorated, because the camera treats the scavenging like actual survival math, not a montage. Caleb Landry Jones does a lot with a voice and a set of servo movements, and Seamus the dog is never sentimentalized into a metaphor. He's just a dog doing dog things while a robot and a dying man argue about how to keep him fed. Where it loses me: the last twenty minutes telegraph exactly where the story is going the moment the tone shifts, so the ending plays as expected rather than earned. A film this careful about restraint in its first two acts deserved a quieter final beat. Still one of the better man-and-dog-at-the-end-of-the-world films, mostly because it resists the urge to make the dog cry on cue. More good-dog-in-crisis picks here: https://dogwithblog.in/finch-movie-review/