I just finished watching Finch (2021), directed by Miguel Sapochnik and written by Craig Luck and Ivor Powell. It stars Tom Hanks as Finch and Caleb Landry Jones as Jeff, a robot Finch builds to care for his dog after he’s gone. (You can see more about it here on IMDb or watch it on Apple TV+.)
I thought I was sitting down to watch a science fiction movie. Instead, somewhere along the way, it became about loss. Maybe that’s what good stories do. They find the places you’re carrying around without realizing it.
As Finch, Jeff, and Goodyear make their way toward San Francisco, Finch knows his time is running short. The whole movie has been moving toward that moment. Not with panic or drama, but with a kind of quiet sadness. He knows he has to hand off the thing he loves most to someone else and trust that it will be okay.
Sitting there in the glow of the television, with the evening already settling outside the window, I found myself thinking about my father. He’s been gone three years now.
There are still moments when I come across something interesting and my first thought is that I’d like to tell him about it. Then comes that familiar realization that I can’t. Not in the way I used to, anyway. I don’t think Finch is really about death. At least not entirely. It feels more like it’s about what we leave in the hands of others when we know we can’t carry it any farther ourselves.
The movie also brought back memories of a different chapter of my life… the years when I was surrounded by dogs. Mia the Lab. Jasper, the Pittie-Boxer mix. Allie, our Poodle-Schnauzer mix. Pepe the Shih Tzu. Brodie, the little double-dapple Dachshund runt. And Bella, the black-and-tan Dachshund who somehow managed to become the unquestioned leader of the whole pack. Funny how a movie dog can do that.
Goodyear’s cautious relationship with Jeff felt familiar. Dogs don’t hand out trust easily. They watch. They wait. They decide for themselves. Seeing that slow process unfold brought back memories I hadn’t thought about in years.
Now, the movie does ask for a certain suspension of disbelief. The idea that one engineer could build something as advanced as Jeff from the remains of his former workplace is probably asking a lot. Still, the effects are convincing enough that I stopped worrying about it pretty quickly. What stayed with me wasn’t the technology anyway. It was the road trip.
There’s something about putting people in a vehicle and sending them across a landscape that strips away distractions. The miles give characters room to reveal themselves. Finch tells stories. Jeff learns. Goodyear watches. Little by little they become something like a family.
The film is set after an apocalypse, but it doesn’t feel much like an apocalypse movie. The world ended more than ten years before the story begins. The solar flare has already done its damage. Civilization has already fallen apart. Most of the usual scenes we expect from the genre are missing. Instead of focusing on the collapse, the movie focuses on what remains afterward. Maybe that’s why it affected me.
The closest thing to traditional post-apocalyptic danger comes after the loss of Dewey, Finch’s first robotic companion. I couldn’t help wondering if Dewey’s name and design might be a small nod to the drones from Silent Running (1972). Whether that’s true or not, that sequence is one of the few moments where the threat of other survivors enters the story. Even then, most of it stays unseen.
Recently I read someone saying they had begun watching more Asian films because even their darker stories often carried a thread of hope. The writer felt that many American films had become so focused on despair that hope almost seemed out of fashion. I don’t know enough to say whether that’s true. But sitting there watching Finch, I found myself thinking there might be something to it.
There’s already plenty of hopelessness available if we’re looking for it. We don’t have to search very hard. What struck me about Finch is that it never pretends things are okay. The world is still broken. Finch is still dying. Loss still comes. And yet hope somehow survives anyway. Not because the circumstances improve. Because love does what it can with the time it has.
This was also my first Miguel Sapochnik film, which probably means I’ve found another rabbit hole to wander down. Robert Zemeckis produced it, and spec-writer Ivor Powell’s career stretches all the way back to Alien in 1979, still one of my favorite films.
The soundtrack is easy to miss if you’re not paying attention. Most of the time it stays out of the way. Then, when it finally swells, it seems to know exactly where the story needs it.
I came across a line from David Rooney’s review in The Hollywood Reporter that matched my own reaction pretty closely. He wrote that “there’s little that’s unpredictable in Miguel Sapochnik’s unabashedly sentimental sci-fi road movie. But darned if I wasn’t misting up in the melancholy climactic scenes.” I understand that feeling.
The movie isn’t especially surprising. Most of us can see where it’s headed long before it gets there. Maybe that’s beside the point. Sometimes knowing where a road ends doesn’t make the journey any less meaningful.
After the credits rolled, I sat there for a few minutes listening to the quiet in the room.
Thinking about my dad.
Thinking about old dogs.
Thinking about how strange it is that a story about a robot wandering through a ruined America can leave a man staring out at the Louisiana pines in the fading light, feeling grateful and sad at the same time.