Buozyte & Samper’s Vesper

This titular teenaged girl is a budding Dr. Frankenstein of botany. She has a talent for splicing together partially sentient plant-things. Apparently, that is a good thing, because her post-apocalyptic world is not dangerous enough already. Unfortunately, the world-building is solely concerned with visuals and has no regard for logic in Kristina Buozyte & Bruno Samper’s Vesper, which opens this Friday in New York.

In the dystopian future, people no longer act out of logical motives or incentives. They just behave the way screenwriters need them to. The elites in the mega-city “citadels” are going to be evil and Vesper, the plucky bio-engineering teen caring for her paralyzed father Darius, will be impossibly noble. He lost his mobility while serving in the Citadel’s army, so they fitted him out with a hovering drone to serve as his real-world avatar—and then cut him loose.

Father and daughter live in the no man’s land surrounding the Citadel. They even spurned the grubby survivalist community led by Vesper’s gangster-like uncle Jonas, but they are still forced to trade with him for the bacteria that powers her father’s life-support system. Vesper hopes deliverance might finally be at-hand when she gives shelter to a Citadel resident who crashed in the wasteland. She hopes her talents for bio-engineering will earn her a place in the mega-city, with a referral from Camelia. However, it quickly becomes clear the mysterious woman is in fact not the potentially helpful power-broker she made herself out to be.

Vesper is an amazing looking film, but the social systems it posits are simplistic at best. Why would the Citadel create these revolutionary potent seeds and then just keep them locked up, awaiting a dissident to steal them? What exactly is their end game? Being mean is not a sufficient answer. Yet, Buozyte and Samper clearly expect critics will reflexively accept and praise their crude class warfare, which has indeed been the case so far.

In a way, those awesome visuals are a bit of a tease, because we only see those striking behemoths featured on the poster from a distance and therefore are never allowed to explore their mysteries. Weirdly, there is also a crazy cult compulsively stacking objects, sort of like the zombies in Cell, but you have to admit lifting from one of the least prestigious Stephen King movies is an unconventionally original proposition.

Finch, on Apple TV+

In the not too distant future, next Sunday A.D. There was a man named Finch Weinberg, not so different from you and me. To keep his sanity, he built some robot friends, but they never got to riff on any cheesy movies, even though Jeff, his newest invention, shares similar coloring with Crow T. Robot. Instead, they are preoccupied with survival—that of Finch and his dog Goodyear—in Miguel Sapochnik’s post-apocalyptic Finch, which premieres today on Apple TV+.

The world is pretty much over and only a few survivors like Weinberg remain holed up in their hiding places. In his soul-scarring experience, nobody works together anymore. Weinberg’s scientific background has served him well, allowing him to hole-up in a power plant he manages to keep in limited operation. Unfortunately, his health is deteriorating, so he created Jeff to help him care for Goodyear. His service drone Dewey just does not have sufficient functionality.

Not long after he is powered up, Jeff helps Weinberg detect an incoming mega-storm. They must flee the entire Midwest region, so Weinberg decides to head towards San Francisco, for sentimental reasons, even though he has never left St. Louis before. Thus begins a road trip across the desolate wasteland ravaged by the vague cosmic disaster that is never fully spelled out. For Jeff there will be growing pains, but even crusty Weinberg will learn late life lessons too.

Craig Luck & Ivor Powell’s screenplay definitely leans into sentimentality, but the ever-reliable Tom Hanks bails out the film’s more indulgent moments with his haunted and world-weary performance as Weinberg. The comparisons with Castaway are obvious, but we come to understand he retreated to his own island long before Armageddon came crashing down. It is a smartly calibrated performance and Hanks truly looks gaunt and grizzled—you almost have to wonder if he shot the film while he was recovering from Covid.