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.
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.
If it sometimes appears to be designed by sentient A.I., then that's all part of the package.
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.
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. (As far as near-interminable singalongs to pass the time go, you can't blame him for this choice.)
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.
A 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. 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".
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.
It's a performance of real tactility and presence.
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. This directive supersedes all other directives."
"When will Finch be absent?" the newly sentient robot asks his maker, a line with all the shamelessness of a sad-face emoji.
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. (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.)
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. 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.
Filmed primarily on location in New Mexico, their road trip has all the familiar contours – deserts, diners, and existential asides over night-sky campouts – while the bonding between man and robot plays like those Terminator 2 scenes in which the pre-teen John Connor schooled his bio-mech babysitter in the meaning of humanity.
Naturally, Jeff is a quick-if-bumbling study, and Jones gives him a modulated, softer voice to match his more fluid body movements, making him seem at times like a bratty, over-eager human teenager. It's pretty funny – and more than a little touching – watching dog and robot discover a shared camaraderie, both unaware that they may be the forebears of a future civilisation.
Directed with clean, unfussy craft by TV pro Miguel Sapochnik (Game of Thrones), from a screenplay by first-timer Craig Luck and veteran producer Ivor Powell (Alien; Blade Runner), Finch feels custom-made for its production company, Amblin Entertainment, the outfit launched back in 1982 by Steven Spielberg's original boy-and-his-'dog' sci-fi, E.T..
And it's a compliment to say that a film about a robot learning human behaviour feels like a simulation of an Amblin tearjerker, as though an especially empathic A.I. had assimilated the key ingredients – beloved movie star, endearingly cute sidekicks, universal themes – and distilled them to their misty-eyed, emotional essence.
It doesn't hurt, of course, that it stars an actor who had no problem carrying an entire movie opposite a volleyball, or whose rapport with his slobbering canine co-star in Turner and Hooch (1989) remains one of his funniest, and most affecting contributions to the screen.
Sure, it can be a little corny at times, but the movie works because of this, not in spite of it – in many ways, the film stumbles toward its 'humanity' in tandem with its awkward robot protagonist, a dynamic that helps goose the sizeable emotional payoff.
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. 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.
The film keeps the usual dramatic backstory and climate change agonising to a functional minimum, preferring instead to find moments of beauty in the rubble: see, for example, Finch and Jeff watching the Northern Lights in the middle of the New Mexico desert, a phenomenon that would have been impossible to observe in a time before the ozone was obliterated. "Now you don't have to be in Alaska to see it," Finch deadpans.
At one point, Finch cues up Talking Heads' Road to Nowhere on the CD player as the old RV lurches down an empty highway, and the song plays as it has always sounded: not as movie shorthand for some bleak trip to the end of the world, but as woozy celebration of the unknown future.
The movie proves that life goes on – with or without human beings.
Finch is streaming on Apple TV Plus.
