Directed By Miguel Sapochnik

Starring – Tom Hanks, Caleb Landry Jones, Lora Martinez-Cunningham

The Plot – On a post-apocalyptic earth, a robot, built to protect the life of his creator’s beloved dog, learns about life, love, friendship and what it means to be human.

Rated PG-13 for brief violent images

Finch — Official Trailer | Apple TV+ – YouTube

POSITIVES

– Emotionally invigorating. There’s something special going on here with the effectiveness of performances, especially considering Hanks is the only human being focused on in the entirety of its narrative. Hanks himself commands the screen with the same wholesome gentleness and emotional dexterity that earned him a Best Actor nomination at the 2001 Academy Awards for “Cast Away”, all the while sharing a bond in chemistry with Jones that feels very resonant of the father and son dynamic that is the driving force of the movie’s creative factor. Because of such, Caleb Landry Jones is equally up to the task of matching Hanks, albeit in a vocal capacity, supplanting a charm and innocence as Jeff that succeeds in allowing us the audience to see and believe him as a child, as initially defined with his personality and knowledge during the first act of the film. Both Hanks and Jones alluring magnetism constantly maintain the focus in their dramatic enveloping without it getting stale or repetitive, making this a two man show where each of the actors in question equally maintain a grip on the dependency of their responsibilities while illustrating through two characters who couldn’t be anymore polar opposites.

– Hefty themes. As to where most films don’t value the time they have to supplant something profoundly meaningful to the experience of the audience, “Finch” enriches matter with life lessons illustrated in the various experiences of its characters. This brings forth many post-film discussions with topics pertaining to existentialism, personal regret, and especially trust that not only speaks volumes to the psychology of the human spirit, but also gives this movie plenty of creative spark to enhance its post-apocalyptic setting that quite literally surrounds the many talking points. What I love about its lessons is the fact that each of them are ingrained naturally in the engagement of the characters, articulated easily enough for the audience to interpret, while not obvious enough in a way that makes it detectable or heavy-handed in the concept of its execution. It’s an interesting commentary that offers an endearing parallel to our own current divisiveness, prescribing “Finch” as the perfect watch for the perfect time.

– Ambitious visuals. The special effects for the movie, wide scale and intimate, not only present some of the best computer generated properties that I have seen in a film in quite sometime, but also supplant with them a direction for heft that seems to outline Sapochnik’s vision long before they ever materialized. On the small scale, the design of Jeff and Duey, two android properties created by Hanks character, maintain near perfect color grading and environmental interaction, thanks in part to continuity in shadow-play and sun reflection that allow the artificial characters to sink seamlessly into the influence of the environment. In addition, the grand scale appeal is represented remarkably with a series of storms and corresponding devastation that attains believability without over-indulging. It does this by keeping a modern approach over the color grading and shading consistency, which allow it to correspond brilliantly with live action properties, giving it a high stakes appeal that would even make Roland Emmerich proud.

– Absorbing environment. What is truly remarkable about Sapochnik as a directing hand, is he hasn’t done it in a big screen capacity since 2010, yet here doesn’t miss a beat with an articulation in sound design so enveloping that it’s tragic I didn’t get to experience it with the sound quality of a theater atmosphere. Part of the feat is the definition in influence, bringing forth an echoing volume mixing and elevating intensity that wholeheartedly engulfs the scenes they decorate. However, the bigger story here resonates within the quirks and ticks of Jeff the robot, outlining heft that is all the more impressive with the versatility of his design, and all the more cerebral with the distortion of Landry Jones vocal capacities, which are obscured enough to keep this from ever feeling like just another actor delivering lines of dialogue into a microphone.

– Simplistic suspense. Because this movie values its characters tremendously, it doesn’t require the laundry list of tropes or cliches within a science fiction epic that weigh heavily into influencing scenes of physical conflict. Instead of fast pace shootouts or shape-shifting explosions, there are these pocketed moments of carefully constructed tension that grow more meaningful and elevated with the passage of time in and out of an environment absorbed by radiation. Because of our love for those aforementioned characters, Sapochnik tiptoes on the trepidation of their well-being with moments that challenge their predetermined planning with unforeseen circumstances that they have little to no defense against, providing supplemental stakes that maintain the urgency in the narrative, while resisting the urge to unload the budget with these unnecessary aspects of enhanced production, instead providing tension the old-fashioned manner, in how it uses your investment to the characters as a mean for digestible vulnerability.

– Tonally optimistic. Despite the reality of a dying world without a breath of life to its reality, there’s a surprising amount of light-hearted appeal and nourishing levity throughout the experience, that offers a therapeutic plunge without sacrificing the aforementioned suspense to which is so vital to the movie’s success. The blossoming comedic muscle distributed throughout gives the characters and their ensuing plights an easy-going indulgence that proves that even a post-apocalyptic world isn’t without awkwardness or ignorance. Likewise, the sentimentality established between man and his four-legged best friend underlines the experience with meaningful sweetness that goes a long way in outlining the stakes for Hanks’ trivialized character, in that this is the last possession left from a bygone world. It conjures up a surprising amount of vivacity within the confines of a world that destroyed itself, which in turn supplants an unconventional experience that allows just enough distance from the abundance of predecessors that the film can be repeatedly compared to.

NEGATIVES

– Story limitations. For my money, I found the narrative easy to invest in and follow throughout the duration of the near two hour run time, but its expansion during the later acts left plenty to be desired in the duration of the experience. In particular, the ambiguity with the previous world before the apocalypse is rarely touched upon, receiving a few notable mentions here and there to draw an inconclusive outline that requires self-interpretation, but never anything that makes this world feel lived in or palpable with the boundaries of the strings we draw to our own world. All in all, the script is just a bit too plain and one-dimensional for my interests, focusing entirely on the current day without ever valuing the mistakes of the past, to which are such a vital influence over current predicaments of the current day conflicts. This is also the problem with the movie’s ending, which is constructed as predictably detectable as a film can conjure up, leaving very little of a pay-off for the sentimentality it attains, despite the fact that it means little to the characters remaining.

– Misunderstood logic. Even with as many benefits as the film garnered in an almost unanimously positive effort for Apple Plus, there’s still leaps and problematic boundaries set by the rules of the world-building that it definitively builds for itself throughout. The first problem I had is with the radiation itself, in that it’s so powerful outside that if you walked under the sun, you could actually notice Hanks skin burning as a result. This would be believable enough if Hanks didn’t spend days upon days inside of this winnebago without a suit or any form of protection to keep him from breathing it in. From there, the design of Jeff itself is a bit flawed in its execution. Not only does this thing know far too much to properly emulate the knowledge front of a child, but just what in the hell does this thing run on? Considering we never see Hanks charging him, or teaching him how to keep himself properly maintained, I guess we should just interpret that he runs on the same radiation with its own problems of aforementioned inconsistencies.

– Lukewarm score. Speaking of inconsistency, the musical accompaniment from composer Gustavo Santaolalla periodically hits and misses on the corresponding tones he uses to flesh out a scene’s tonal capacities. Such is the case during sequences of dire peril, where a touch of whimsical wonderment washes over the ears in the most inappropriate manner possible, casting further emphasis on the abundance of aforementioned levity, but for all of the wrong reasons. On their own, the music themselves could be considered beautiful with the right context, but nothing manufactured for this film ever feels responsibly relevant for the scenes and sequences they enhance, except for maybe the stock action cues during sequences of transition. Considering this is the same man who honed such an irreplaceable presence on films like “Babel” or “Brokeback Mountain”, his misfiring here feels all the more tragic for a story he could’ve prescribed such expanding layers for, but instead bumbles the execution with the only example of streaming production to an otherwise big screen experience.

My Grade: 7/10 or B