Finch

If there is a cinematic embodiment of hope, it may well be Tom Hanks. So as the last embers of humanity burn out in the sun-bleached future of Finch, it’s fitting that it’s Hanks who holds out a glimmer of a future for an Earth after people: even if it’s one for dogs and robots.

As the titular Finch, he’s holed up in a research facility in a desert-ified St. Louis with only a dog (Seamus) and a robot named Dewey (a telling nod to sci-fi eco landmark Silent Running), waiting for his end from the cancer from the UV rays that have left no blade of grass on Earth. He’s not the last survivor, even if he may as well be, so his sole concern has become the fate of the dog after he dies. That’s why he’s built the adorable and naive Jeff: a dorky, innocent droid who will be the pup’s protector when Finch has succumbed to this burning world.

Finch has undergone radical changes since it first appeared as Bios on the 2017 Black List of great but unmade scripts. Most importantly, it’s lost a rambling third act and a coterie of belatedly introduced supporting characters who actually made it to the “casting announcement” stage of production. Instead, House of the Dragon co-showrunner Miguel Sapochnik lops that all off to concentrate on the relationship between the exacerbated and desperate Finch, and the amiable but awkward Jeff, delightfully played by Caleb Landry Jones (God’s Pocket, Get Out) through impressive motion capture. It allows for a spacious examination of their bond, even if it never quite grapples with the deeper issues raised of Jeff’s free will, and Finch’s status as his dying creator, and what responsibilities Finch has toward this metal inheritor of the Earth. Instead, it is about the precious nature of existing: Even without expressions, there is such joy in Jeff’s immobile face as he experiences the wonder of having fingers, and Finch gets to witness that.

Sapochnik has delved into bleak futures before, with his 2010 brutal forced-organ-donation capitalist satire Repo Men, but Finch is much closer to last year’s The Midnight Sky, in which George Clooney stared at his own incoming invisible apocalypse. It’s not just that it’s two great actors in the end times. It’s two great actors harkening back to the warning cinema of the 1970s, both evoking their urgent flag waving and carrying a bitter desperation that it’s too late to heed their message (and considering the real-world rising global temperature, that bleak outlook seems positively optimistic). Yet there’s also that resolute optimism in the darkest moments, those sparks of joy between Jeff and Finch that drag this apocalypse out of a dark mire that could have turned it into The Road. Instead, it’s like a more melancholic Short Circuit.