![]() ![]() ![]() But in other ways, Finch keeps this familiar sentiment at a curiously philosophical remove sympathetic, perhaps, to the plight of Earth's current ruling species but somewhat indifferent to their fate. That Jeff will acquire a measure of humanity, or at least the ability to mimic it, is a given for this sort of film, where the default mode is technology learning the supposedly more desirable qualities of mankind. "There's this line, 'Hope is what keeps us alive,' and it felt like we needed to lean into that," Sapochnik told the Hollywood Reporter. And given the software giant behind the film, the fantasy might be read as a stand-in for some aspirational big-tech utopia, where the California waters sparkle blue and the air is always clear over Silicon Valley. ![]() With St Louis threatened by a freak radioactive storm, Finch, Jeff and Goodyear pile into a retrofitted family RV and set out for coastal San Francisco, and the movie becomes a classic American pilgrimage to the mythic West. (Considering how many films are succumbing to the ease of computer-generated canines these days, an approach that's not without its charm, Seamus is also becoming something of an anomaly.) Truly, it's a hard heart that won't be warmed (or played for a sap) by this setup, especially as inhabited by two performers – national treasure Hanks and Seamus, the real-life rescue dog who plays Goodyear – who exude a quality that's increasingly rare among major American movie stars: the charisma to hold an audience by simply existing in the frame. "I would say 98 percent of everything that, that robot does is directly lifted from Caleb's performance," Sapochnik told The Hollywood Reporter. "When will Finch be absent?" the newly sentient robot asks his maker, a line with all the shamelessness of a sad-face emoji. This directive supersedes all other directives." Since Finch's health is ailing, he's designed Jeff to keep Goodyear company when he's not around, programming the droid with a variation on Asimov's laws of robotics that includes a fourth, pooch-friendly instruction: "In Finch's absence, robot must protect the welfare of the dog. It's a performance of real tactility and presence. ![]() Jeff is performed, via on-set motion-capture, by Caleb Landry Jones ( Nitram), whose gangly, loping movements and subtle shift toward a more human voice give him the sense of an awkward child learning to understand the world around him. 13), this new bot sputters to life with a voice that sounds like a mix of MacSpeak and Borat, and insists on calling itself, of all things, "Jeff". When he's not scouring the wastes, Finch is holed up in an abandoned St Louis, Illinois bunker playing fetch with Goodyear – a scruffy, golden-haired mutt who regards his master with quizzical affection – and putting the finishing touches on a junkyard robot he's pieced together from salvaged scrap parts and old software.Ī clear descendent of sassy rust-buckets like WALL-E and Short Circuit's Johnny 5 (with a touch of Hardware's spiky M.A.R.K. "We can all go dark, but it's quite hard to genuinely find a way to tell that's hopeful," Sapochnik told GamesRadar. (As far as near-interminable singalongs to pass the time go, you can't blame him for this choice.) Like so many post-apocalyptic loners before him – Robert Neville, Max Rockatansky, WALL-E – Finch roams the bombed-out landscape scavenging whatever supplies he can find, a four-wheeled helper droid trundling alongside him as he warbles Don McLean's American Pie. In his second film for Apple, after last year's distinctly more grandpa-friendly Greyhound, Hanks plays Finch Weinberg, an aging robotics engineer who is one of the few survivors of cataclysmic global event: a solar flare that has left the planet blanketed in radioactive dust and menaced by a deadly sun. If it sometimes appears to be designed by sentient A.I., then that's all part of the package. Stir in some doomsday visuals, a dash of climate anxiety and a sprinkling of buddy comedy and you've got Finch, a totally charming – and pretty moving – riff on the American road movie that takes a refreshingly ambivalent view of a post-human future. As Jean-Luc Godard famously said (okay, maybe I'm paraphrasing): all you need for a movie is a robot, a dog and Tom Hanks. ![]()
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