Tom Hanks spends most of Finch behind a beard, a hat and a protective suit, which is a strange way to use the most recognizable face in American movies. The film around him is stranger still: a post-apocalyptic road movie about a dying engineer who builds a robot to raise his dog. Miguel Sapochnik directs from a script by Craig Luck and Ivor Powell. Caleb Landry Jones voices the machine. Finch runs 116 minutes and sits in the science fiction, drama and adventure lanes, with a tagline promising an unforgettable journey. The journey is fine. The movie is smaller than its premise.
Trailer, via Apple TV.
Fifteen Years After the Solar Flare
The setup is stark. Fifteen years after a massive solar flare destroyed the ozone layer, Earth is a wasteland. Extreme weather and ultraviolet rays scorch the surface. Temperatures reach 150 °F, or 66 °C. Finch Weinberg is a robotics engineer and one of the few survivors. He lives underground in a St. Louis laboratory his old company once owned, with his dog Goodyear and a helper-robot named Dewey. He leaves only in a protective suit, hunting supplies.
He is dying. The film never names the illness, though Finch is seen reading a book on radiation poisoning. That omission is a fair choice. The movie is not about the diagnosis. It is about what a man does with the time he has left. Finch builds a more advanced humanoid robot, Jeff, and feeds it volumes of encyclopedic knowledge, including a manual on training and caring for dogs. Jeff’s job is simple and impossible: keep Goodyear alive after Finch is gone.
Goodyear Does Not Trust the Robot
That is the smartest beat in the film. A dog’s suspicion is a better measure of Jeff than any speech about humanity could be, and the movie knows it. Then a massive storm bears down on St. Louis, one that will destroy the area and kill Finch. Finch, Jeff, Dewey and Goodyear load into a modified Fleetwood motorhome and head for San Francisco.
The departure is hasty, and it costs them. Jeff downloaded only 72 percent of his encyclopedic data. His mental capacity needs training. So the road trip becomes a classroom, and Finch becomes a teacher with a failing body and no time to waste. He tries to pass on lessons about life and about protecting Goodyear. Jeff’s questions amuse him and grate on him in roughly equal measure. The robot starts showing initiative.
That is the engine of Finch, and it is a good one. A machine that is 72 percent educated is a machine that can surprise you. Jeff is not a threat and not a savior. He is a student, and the film is at its most alive when it lets him be one.
Dewey and the Bear Trap in Denver
By the time they reach Denver, Finch is bedridden. Jeff decides to loot an abandoned hospital with Dewey. Dewey is crushed by a beartrap. Finch retrieves Jeff and they escape the city, realizing the area is a trap set by other humans. The sequence is the film’s hardest turn, and it works because the movie spent its first hour making Dewey small and useful and loved without announcing that it was doing so.
Take an unforgettable journey.
That is the tagline, and it is the promise the film makes to its audience. Whether it keeps that promise is the whole question. The Denver stretch is where Finch comes closest. It is tense, it is mean, and in this paper’s view it costs the characters something they cannot replace. The rest of the movie too often costs them nothing.
Caleb Landry Jones Gives Jeff the Range
Jones does the voice of Jeff, and it is the performance the film leans on hardest. Hanks is Hanks — weary, kind, watchable, doing the thing he has done for thirty years without visible strain. But Jeff is the role with the range, and Jones plays him as a machine learning manners in real time. The curiosity reads as curiosity. The frustration reads as frustration. When Jeff pushes back, you believe a program could get there.
The rest of the cast is thinner than the credits suggest. Oscar Avila appears as a truck driver in a flashback. Lora Martinez-Cunningham plays a mother, Marie Wagenman a daughter, Emily Jones a warning system. Samira Wiley, Skeet Ulrich, Laura Harrier and Alexis Raben were all set to appear. Their roles were cut from the final version. That is a lot of talent on the floor, and the finished film feels the absence. The world beyond Finch and Jeff is sketched in flashbacks and ruins, and it never quite becomes a place.
San Francisco Is a Formality
Here is the problem. Finch has a strong first act, a strong middle turn, and a destination it treats as a formality. San Francisco is the goal from the moment the storm appears, and the film never gives us a reason to care whether they reach it beyond the fact that they are driving there. The motorhome is a good container for a two-hander. The country outside it is mostly weather and wreckage.
It is not that Finch runs out of ideas. It is that it runs out of nerve. The premise promises a hard question: what does a dying man owe a dog, and can a machine pay it? The film keeps almost asking that question and then hands the answer to a montage.
The film is clean, legible and never boring. It is also never surprising after the first hour. The visuals earn their praise — the scorched light, the suits, the interiors — but visual competence is not the same as a point of view.
The Movie Was Once Called BIOS
Finch was announced as BIOS in October 2017. Filming ran across New Mexico and Toronto from February to May 2019. Universal Pictures scheduled a U.S. theatrical release for October 2, 2020. The pandemic delayed it several times. It was retitled Finch, sold to Apple TV+, and released on November 5, 2021 under Apple Original Films. That history explains a lot. This is a movie made for one world and delivered to another, and the seams show in its caution.
The film received lukewarm reviews. Critics praised Hanks, the visuals and the overall charm. They criticized the lack of originality and innovation within the post-apocalypse genre. Both halves of that are correct, and they are not in tension. Charm is real. Originality is a separate ledger.
The genre has been asking what makes us human since before Jeff was a sketch. Finch’s answer is: teaching. A man with no time teaches a machine with no experience how to love a dog. That is a genuinely good answer. The film just does not trust it enough to sit still with it.
What Finch Leaves You Holding
Finch is worth watching once, and it is worth watching for Jeff. The robot is the only character who changes in a way the movie has to earn, and Jones earns it. Hanks gives the film a center, and Goodyear gives it a stake. The Denver sequence gives it a wound. Everything else is competent, warm and a little safe.
The film’s deepest flaw is that it is about death and refuses to be sad. Finch is dying from the first scene. The storm is coming. The dog will outlive him. Those are three hard facts, and the movie keeps softening them into lessons. A story about a man building a parent for his dog should hurt more than this one does. It should let the fear sit. Instead it moves to the next teaching moment, and the next, until the credits arrive on schedule.
That is why the score lands where it does. Finch is not a failure. It is a film with one great idea, one great performance and a script that never finds the second act it needs. It charms you and then it lets you go, and you are not sure afterward what it wanted you to carry out of the wasteland with you.
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