Finch (2021)

Finch arrives as a relic of a gentler commercial instinct: a Tom Hanks vehicle about a dying man, a homemade robot, and a dog, assembled with the solemnity of a studio that still believed in the therapeutic road movie. The premise, a solar flare that stripped the ozone layer and left the Earth at a hundred and fifty degrees, functions purely as weather. It is genre furniture, inherited and dusty, and the film never once turns to the camera to explain what we have done to the planet. That restraint is almost quaint.

Jeff, the robot, spends the running time acquiring vocabulary, misreading social cues, and learning to throw a tennis ball. We are meant to find this touching, and we mostly do, though the lessons about trust and care arrive as sentiment instead of instruction. The film has no interest in scolding anyone. Its politics, such as they are, amount to a man teaching a machine to love a dog. Race is absent. Gender is absent. The economy is absent. Even the corporate laboratory where Finch once worked is treated as a place, not an indictment.

The most revealing detail sits offscreen. Samira Wiley, Laura Harrier, Skeet Ulrich, and others were cast and then removed entirely, leaving a finished product that is almost one man, one robot, and one dog. A longer cut might have introduced actual human beings and their messy expectations. That version was cut for time. The surviving film is warm, competent, and culturally weightless, a picture that would have fit comfortably into 1998 and seems mildly puzzled to find itself in 2021.