A century of sci-fi films that chart our changing attitudes to AI – from Fritz Lang to Finch
![Streaming: the best films about artificial intelligence and robots](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/dc40f71415a7198828e641d5ac73ff5b26e5800d/0_395_6000_3600/master/6000.jpg?width=1200&height=630&quality=85&auto=format&fit=crop&overlay-align=bottom%2Cleft&overlay-width=100p&overlay-base64=L2ltZy9zdGF0aWMvb3ZlcmxheXMvdG8tZGVmYXVsdC5wbmc&enable=upscale&s=c0bdf81f5104ca78fb27f46a5fe3df96)
“Old-fashioned” is generally not a term you want to hear applied to science fiction, a genre from which one tends to expect the futuristic and unfamiliar. But old-fashioned is very much how Finch (Apple TV+) feels, and not just because of the reassuring elder-statesman presence of Tom Hanks in the title role: a post-apocalyptic drama built from the scraps of a thousand others before it, it’s about as nostalgically cuddly as a vision of a barren, desolate future can be. Hanks is seemingly the last surviving human on the planet; an inventor, he assembles an AI
Robot (voiced by Caleb Landry Jones) to mind his adorable dog when he’s gone. Awww.
The narrative direction of the film, previously a more downbeat enterprise, was altered to be more optimistic when the global pandemic struck. Perhaps Finch’s creation, a throwback to the rickety robot aesthetics of 1980s kids’ favourite Short Circuit, was always intended to be a hi-tech pet-sitter: either way, in the long history of cinema’s fascination with
Artificial intelligence (AI), rarely has the technology been used to such wholesome ends.