Tom Hanks explains how his new film Finch is different from Cast Away. Released in 2000, Cast Away famously features Hanks as a FedEx employee who becomes stranded on an uninhabited island after his plane crashes in the South Pacific. With only his volleyball Wilson to accompany him, the film follows Hanks' character's numerous, desperate attempts to get off the island and return home to his girlfriend (Helen Hunt). Cast Away was a hit at the box office, grossing $429 million, and earned Hanks his fifth Oscar nod for Actor in a Leading Role.
Hanks' newest film Finch will be his second to release exclusively on Apple TV+, after Greyhound was a hit for the streamer last year. From director Miguel Sapochnik and rookie screenwriters Craig Luck and Ivor Powell, the film follows the renowned actor as the titular Finch, a terminally ill robotics engineer and Earth's sole human survivor of a cataclysmic solar event. To look after his dog Goodyear once he's gone, he builds an intelligent android named Jeff, played by Get Out's Caleb Landry Jones, and embarks on a cross-country road trip to teach the robot about what it means to be human.
During a recent roundtable that Collider attended, Hanks was asked about the spiritual connection between his newest film and the fan-favorite Castaway, considering they are both stories about humans in solitude. However, Hanks personally doesn't see much of a connection between the two films. While Cast Away is about a man whose life is unexpectedly improved by the unfortunate circumstances he finds himself in, "nothing great happens to Finch," he says. Finch is instead about a man living on borrowed time on a "quest for permanence." Read what the actor had to say below:
For myself, as one of the originators of Cast Away, that movie is about the best thing that ever happened to this man. He was in a plane crash and lived on an island for four years, and from that came this life that he never would have imagined that he’d have. That’s not the theme of Finch. Nothing great happened to Finch. His time is limited. This dog means responsibility and love, and a whole different connection. The quest for permanence in some brand of eternal effect that Finch is looking for, in creating Jeff the robot, so that he can take care of Goodyear the dog, is a different course in the seminary of solitude versus loneliness and survival versus flourishing.
After the trailer for Finch was released last month, it appeared that Hanks would be the only human character on screen for much of the film. As a result, many were quick to begin drawing comparisons to Cast Away. But in the quote above, Hanks very eloquently pinpoints what exactly distinguishes the two stories, even though they may share a few similarities on the surface.
Hanks' comments are a good reminder of what actually makes one movie like another, encouraging audiences to look past the obvious and to the heart of a film's message. For example, Hanks creates companions in both films, he does so for very different reasons - not to mention that playing off Caleb Landry Jones' motion-capture performance was likely a completely different experience for Hanks than acting opposite a blood-smeared volleyball. While Finch might have less in common with Cast Away than previously assumed, Hanks can only hope his new film releasing on November 5 reaches the commercial and critical success of his previous survival drama.
Source: Collider
