Tom Hanks is the only person on screen in Finch, where he hangs out with his dog and a robot in a post-apocalyptic world, but he feels there’s a major difference between his new film and Cast Away.

Cast Away, released in 2000, stars Hanks as a FedEx employee who becomes stuck on an isolated island when his plane crashes in the South Pacific. The film shows Hanks’ character’s frequent, desperate efforts to leave the island and return home to his sweetheart, with only his volleyball Wilson to accompany him (Helen Hunt). Cast Away was a box office success, grossing $429 million and earning Hanks his seventh Oscar nomination for Actor in a Leading Role.

Speaking to Digital Spy and other press ahead of Finch’s debut on Apple TV+ this Friday (November 5), he stated that while the two solo journeys have parallels, his character in Finch has a totally different objective.

Finch will be Hanks’ second film to be released exclusively on Apple TV+, following Greyhound, which was a hit for the streaming service last year. The film follows the acclaimed actor as the titular Finch, a terminally sick robotics engineer and Earth’s solitary human survivor of a cataclysmic solar catastrophe, directed by Miguel Sapochnik and written by Craig Luck and Ivor Powell. To look after his dog Goodyear after he goes away, he creates an intelligent android named Jeff, played by Get Out’s Caleb Landry Jones, and begins on a cross-country road journey to educate the robot what it is to be human.

“On first blush, sure,” Hanks concedes to SYFY WIRE. However, he claims that the Cast Away comparison isn’t fully accurate because his character Chuck Noland “always knew that there was some other thing that was going on. He knew the world was going on for the rest of the time.” Finch, the protagonist of the next Apple TV+ film, is in a different scenario. He’s on a quest with his dog, Goodyear.

Photo: Apple TV+

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“I think there’s just a different philosophical bent on trying to discover what is out, as opposed to trying to get back to a thing that you know is there,” Hanks adds.

“The difference is, and this is something that [director] Miguel [Sapochnik] and I talked about ad infinitum in the course of making the movie, is that this movie starts and Finch begins with the desire to create the next version of what life is going to be,” Hanks explained.

“In Cast Away, which was an important movie for me, it was about the discovery of what was needed in order to live a full life and that was company and getting off that island. There is no island to get off of in Finch and there is company that is built into it, so the desire and emotional, philosophical structure of Finch is very different.

“There is also a moment in Cast Away where he’s willing to sacrifice his life in order to get off that island. At no time in this is Finch willing to sacrifice his life because it’s miserable or there’s a risk he has to take.

“He is going to stay alive as long as possible because he has to love that dog, take care of that dog and see to it that that dog survives.”

For Cast away, he said: “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.”