Apple TV+ must really like Tom Hanks, with “Finch” representing the second movie featuring the actor the service scooped up during the pandemic. Like “Greyhound,” this one is in a modest affair that would likely have been hard-pressed to make waves in theaters, casting Hanks in a last-man-on-Earth scenario that’s part “Cast Away,” part “WALL-E.”
Indeed, although production wrapped before the pandemic, the premise — which casts Hanks as the title character, a robotics engineer by training, who survives an apocalypse (eventually explained) with only his dog and a newly operative robot — would have been ideal for shooting under Covid protocols with such a limited cast. The robot (performed Caleb Landry Jones) takes the name Jeff, and like a number of recent projects, “Finch” winds up being an exploration not only of the man’s fight for survival but the machine’s dawning humanity, with Finch programming it to make caring for the dog, should anything happen to him, its prime directive.
