Having a dog or a robot as a best friend is one of the greatest wishes of many little boys. Finch Weinberg is a bit older boy, but still more than blessed in this respect: He has a dog and a robot as best friend. Finch was also perfectly cast in the film named after him, because he is played by Tom Hanks. He already has a lot of gray hair. But at least since he portrayed a boy in “Big” from 1988 who suddenly wakes up in the body of a grown man, Hanks has almost always played variants of this role of the child trapped in the body of an adult: men wandering the world with amazed eyes go, who are mostly very innocent and who suffer from the smallest misconduct, as otherwise only regicide in Shakespeare.
Finch is now suffering badly from the fact that he may soon no longer be able to take care of his loyal dog Goodyear. Because in the near future a catastrophe has struck the earth. It’s 65 degrees outside, the cities of America are buried under a thick layer of sand, almost all life has been destroyed. No, that’s not climate change, for once humans cannot help this catastrophe. The sun has chosen to scorch the earth with gamma rays. That’s why Finch lives with the dog in an underground bunker full of books and clutter of technology for handicrafts. Just like a big little boy settles in when the world belongs to him alone. During the day, wrapped up thickly to protect himself from radiation and heat, he wanders through the supermarket ruins in search of dog food and canned peaches. One aisle down, former supermarket customers shrivel up, dust storms are raging outside and those who take care of themselves build the gas mask themselves. The film cites the worn image arsenal of the post-apocalypse in an exemplary manner.
The task is not that difficult, but unfortunately the robot is overwhelmed by the dog
Because Finch survived the catastrophe, but still received a good dose of radiation, he builds a robot that is as human-like as possible, which takes care of poor Goodyear after his death, which he expects very soon. And this robot is really annoying. Actually, his task would be feasible, because the film dog looks sad, sometimes he plays, otherwise he doesn’t do anything – a robot should definitely take care of it. But someone must have told the scriptwriters something about “machine learning”, the method similar to learning with which artificial intelligences are trained for their tasks today. From this, the author duo Craig Luck and Ivor Powell derived a free ticket for robotic slapstick in a disaster setting. Actually a nice idea, because the apocalypse genre often takes itself far too seriously. But a stumbling robot does not carry two hours of film, and because the dog is only allowed to watch, Tom Hanks has to do the rest by himself. Of course he manages, at least since he only had to survive in “Cast Away” in the company of a painted volleyball on a lonely island. But Hanks’ acting skills don’t add anything to the film or the role.
“Finch” is already the second production by and with Tom Hanks that does not make the leap to the cinema, but is shown on Apple’s streaming service due to the pandemic. In the world war drama “Greyhound”, for which Hanks had also written the script, he took on German submarines as the captain of a warship during the Second World War. That was an ambitious film project, in which not everything worked, but which dared to do something. “Finch”, on the other hand, plays it safe in every respect.
Tom Hanks sings “American Pie” under his helmet. What else should he do?
It is somewhat irritating that the catastrophe, which looks so much like climate change, is emphatically not man-made in the film. Sure, in the US something like that is quickly rated as “political” and the entertainment industry may not always want to get involved in such a discussion. In this case in particular, the rescue of the dear dog, the last piece of intact nature on the planet, so to speak, would have taken on an aspect in times of climate change that goes beyond the personal sensitivities of the main character.
After all: unlike most film dogs, the dog can at least really be a dog, not only with a dog’s eye, but also with dog needs and without the human characteristics that are imputed to him. In this film, they are given to the creepy robot, in whose care the poor dog is given. So the film relies a little too much on the dramaturgically rather cheap rescue of the animal and forces the viewer on an emotionality that feels hollow, artificial and forced. Even Tom Hanks can’t change that, no matter how lovable he sings “American Pie” under his dust helmet.
Finch, USA 2021 – Director: Miguel Sapochnik. Book: Craig Luck, Ivor Powell. With: Tom Hanks. Apple, 115 minutes.