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Finch robot voice7/14/2023 ![]() The robot who eventually names himself Jeff is played via motion capture by Caleb Landry Jones, who contorts his body into an array of unexpected, Gumby-like poses, and whose voice and line delivery sort of sound like Borat doing a Yoda impression, or Wall-E visiting the Twin Peaks Red Room. Finch’s only concern is ensuring Goodyear’s safety after he dies, and so when the robot he built comes to life, Finch devotes himself to teaching the robot how to survive. Cinematographer Jo Willems emphasizes Hanks’ emaciated frame with compositions that juxtapose him as the lone man amid the metallics of his laboratory, his weatherbeaten skin and thinning hair a contrast to an expansive library and a paltry pantry. Years of exposure to the elements have destroyed Finch’s insides, and he’s slowly starving from the lack of food. And by night, in his dual laboratory and home in tech company headquarters Tae Technologies, Finch plays with his dog Goodyear - for whom he’s been assembling a robot companion. By day, he drives around the city in a souped-up construction vehicle, wearing a slowly decaying UV suit as he ventures into buildings, collects any leftover resources and supplies, and marks his movements on a map. ![]() Desperate people do desperate things, and both the South and East Coast have their dangers, so Finch has stayed put in the Midwest. Craig Luck and Ivor Powell’s script parcels out information a bit at a time: A combination of ozone destruction and an electromagnetic pulse (à la The Matrix) have combined to leave most of the United States a hot, irradiated wasteland. Set in the somewhat near future, Finch follows robotics engineer Finch Weinberg (Hanks), who has carved out a life of routine for himself in a ruined version of St. ![]() And whatever subversive questions the film could have raised about the responsibilities people carry when dealing with AI get lost in the film’s increasingly schmaltzy second half, which gestures toward an I Am Legend exploration of societal collapse, but ultimately doesn’t follow through in a compelling way. just reading about it doesn’t work so well when it’s self-importantly delivered to a robot made to do a human’s bidding. A Good Will Hunting-style speech about the experience of living life vs. Instead, Finch sets up a driving selfishness in Hanks’ character that the film mistakes for selflessness. What Cloud Atlas dared to do, though, that Finch does not, is complicate Hanks and make him more than just America’s Dad. With every one of Hanks’ aghast eye squints, bemused double looks, and easy laughs, Sapochnik is making the same gamble that the Wachowskis did with Hanks in their far superior sci-fi movie, Cloud Atlas. Director Miguel Sapochnik (a Game of Thrones veteran who earned attention for episodes like “Hardhome” and “Battle of the Bastards”) is betting on Hanks’ decades of accrued good will. Movie lovers know Hanks’ expressions and intonations, his body language, and his physicality, and his familiarity is key to the immediate sympathy the character and film require. Few actors exist the way Hanks does, in that space between “instantly recognizable” and “consistently malleable.” His new sci-fi movie Finch is both strengthened and hampered by that duality.Ī tonally bizarre film that’s half motion-capture Pinocchio story, half live-action adaptation of Futurama’s infamously melancholy “Jurassic Bark” episode, Finch relies on Hanks’ instant likeability and genuine warmth to drive home the devastation of a post-apocalyptic world. ![]() They all have something in common, as ordinary people played in extraordinary ways. The teenager living out his dream adult life in Big, a dying man willing to throw himself into a volcano in Joe Versus the Volcano, the man with a million lives in Forrest Gump, the classic American cowboy in the Toy Story franchise, a gangster in Road to Perdition, an FBI agent in Catch Me If You Can, famed newspaperman Ben Bradlee in The Post. Tom Hanks’ career is dotted with American Everyman characters he’s transformed into iconic, fantastical figures by presenting them in naturalistic and humane ways. ![]()
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