ST Finn/John Boyega Discussion Thread

Star Wars questions begins at 12:53
https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/culture/article/john-boyega-interview-2020

 

Finally, big magazine and article talking the bs Lucasfilm/Disney pulled. Glad that Boyega is getting as blunt as he is.

 

When it comes to the stormtrooper thing. it has to be remembered that no Stormtrooper had a face previously and i suspect no matter who it was under the helmet fans would have had an issue with it. he probably should know how nitpicky fans are by now.

 

In the films? No, but they were portrayed as ordinary humans and the EU gave them faces.

But here's the important thing, why does it "has to be remembered" that no Stormtrooper had a face previously? Why does that reason explain the death threats and racism that got thrown at John Boyega? Why is it relevant?

Unless it was a woman who was underneath that helmet, I don't believe that for a second. If it had been a white man, I don't believe there'd have been an attempted boycotting, death threats, politcal correctness and pandering accusations etc.

I've even seen people claim that it didn't make sense for there to be a black Stormtrooper because Star Wars' universe was predominantly white with Lando being one of the few exceptions.

Has anyone accused Adam Driver/Domhnall Gleeson of only getting the role because he was the token guy, because of politcal correctness or some agenda? That they didn't get their respective role because of any acting merit but because Disney was trying to pandering to a specific demographic?

Those were and still are the accusations leveled at John Boyega and those would absolutely not exist if they had cast a white actor to play Finn.

"Nitpicky" is one hell of a weird way to describe people sending death threats/demanding boycotts/etc to an actor.

Would you describe the fans that attacked Kelly Marie Tran as "nitpicky fans"?

 

Its a way to separate the fact that he is black to the fact that fans wouldn't have been happy either way.

Oh i believe it would have. it could be a white guy with facial hair and fans would be all over it, mocking the hell out of it. the first storm trooper to remove his helmet on screen was gonna get people talking either way. how were you ever gonna match what fans expectation?

Its just the racial and gender system right now. people are too aware to the political awareness. so for some you either give people of colour and gender special treatment, which people will notice straight of, or you don't and have people say you treated them poorly.

And if you go the route of treating race or gender as unimportant then people will hate that too.

Given how the prequels were treated. given how Jake Lloyd was treated or ahmed best for playing a CGI character (not for being black). Id say look around and see how absurd fans can get.

 

Boyega’s absolutely right. And had Finn’s character been written prior to the BLM awakening, there’s no way JJ and RJ would’ve portrayed him in the buffoonish, always-sweating, always-scared, damp squib side quest way they did. All the focus was on the two white leads, and the people of color were basically given a backseat to ride in. And Boyega is right to be angry about it.

 

The focus was on the established force sensitive characters (not unusual). They did Finn dirty by making his character a Buffon who runs and screams 75% of the time, but I don’t see how it’s surprising at all that the major focus was on the Skywalker and the force sensitive lead for the trilogy. Oscar Isaac got a much bigger role throughout the trilogy, so not sure why he singled him out either. They should have never marked Finn in such a big way for TFA, it set up false expectations.

 

But isn't that basically the same as Han and Leia in the OT? you could argue they were the side quest of Lukes story.

Personally with Finn i think the issue is more that they didn't think more about his skin color when writing his role. as people say if he was white no one would care if his role was as side quest guy. but because he is black and was marketed the way he was for TFA its now seen as racial discrimination.

I mean the problem with Rose is not that she is asian. sadly fans just didn't like her character and were A-holes about it. they tried to write rose as a strong female character but people ether hated that she was preaching to the other character of color who people knew better from the last film, or they hated some of her decisions in the movie. but none of those were down to race. in terms of how they treated her in the last movie... personally i think JJ just wanted to recapture the Han, Leia and Luke 3sum. and they thought they would give her more to do with the Leia scenes that didn't work out from the sound of it.

 

Not at all. He was written as the potential for the next generation of "Jedi" or "protectors of peace and justice", along with other characters like Jannah. TROS feeds off of Lukes lessons to Rey, in what he believes is the way moving forward. We see this in the conversations between Finn and Jannah. People feel the force. Finn believes it was the force. He is the character that more represents the first of the new Jedi Knights, forwarded by Rey.

Nothing was dismissed from his role, it was never going to be the same character role that went to Reys character.

 

I am probably one of those rare people that believe he wasn't wasted in TLJ. His plot wasn't connected to the main jedi stuff and maybe thats what many have an issue with. maybe they feel it should have been Rey and Finn against the world and he was moved over to another plot. but honestly when you look at his role in TLJ he was on his own mission. he got his big boss battle moment with phasma ect ect.

I get the impression alot of the sourness is about the fact that Finn wasn't a jedi. so it seemed like a demotion as the films went on.

 

All this analysis is hilarious, because the real problem can be summed up in two words... Rian Johnson.

It has been said a thousand times that Disney gave Rian Johnson complete freedom to do whatever he wanted. He bragged about it. Bragged that his first draft was 90% of what they shot. So everything that happens in that film was his fault, or his achievement. Finn was sidelined by RJ. Not by JJ. JJ tried to bring the character back to relevance in ROS. The single biggest mistake ever made by anyone involving Star Wars (even topping Lucas' choice to make Jar Jar such an important character in TPM) was hiring RJ and then green lighting his horrendous script. He's a pretty good director visually, but story wise, IMO, he is not only bad...he is completely incompetent. So all of this Disney is racist stuff is a complete joke. Disney wanted to give us a black hero in Star Wars. JJ did a great job of setting his story up. Then RJ showed up and ruined the character. He also ruined Poe's character, and of course, he ruined Luke's character. He also ruined Snoke. He also introduced three new horrendous characters, Rose, Holdo, and DJ, one of whom died, and the other two who proved to be such weak characters they were either mostly written out (Rose) or not even brought back at all (DJ).

Rian Johnson destroyed Finn's character. It wasn't a plot by Disney to use race to get a bigger audience and then sideline him on purpose.

 

The ST had an incredible cast and wasted almost all of them imo John Boyega got one of the worst deals for sure.

I didn't even need him to be a Jedi, just a compelling character. We've never seen (onscreen) a stormtrooper who deserts the Empire/First Order and joins the Rebellion/Resistance. It's a compelling setup, especially given that First Order stormtroopers were kidnapped as children and brainwashed, and there's so many places they could have gone with it, but Finn's stormtrooper identity is forgotten almost as soon as he takes the helmet off. It would have been cool seeing how hard it is for him to adjust outside of the military cult he grew up in and all the things he would need to learn to function in regular society. But no. He's just a buffoon under the helmet. Great.

 

The problem was never that Finn wasn't force sensitive
I have long put that hope to bed. Thats more of a TFA concern after the first movie people just wanted to see a compelling black character in star wars and we never got that

The problem was that Rian and to a lesser extent JJ made his character a tagalong caricature with no character development. Disney is to blame as well because its clear they did not prioritize developing any characters in these movies
Their incompetence ruined a lot of other characters mind you


Boyega is probably a lot less prone to corporate speak now that he is on the other side of the triligy and sees all his optimism got Finn nothing.

You know what I can't even blame JJ anymore. Its all on Rian imo he was the one who doubled down on all the bad traits finn had in TFA and made him play sidekick to another character who was later sidelined creating a huge narrative pit for Finn's character and impression that he has done nothing for most of the trilogy

 

I think the general disappointment of Captain Phasma as a character contributes significantly to people being underwhelmed that defeating her was Finn's big achievement.

 

More fan projection. Disney liked the design of a chrome stormtrooper. Fans liked it, too, I guess. Fans then speculated and speculated what the character would do or be. When Phasma turned out not to be what they speculated they got disappointed. Thats on them though.

 

Alot of the sequel trilogy is toy sales. phasma look good for toys. JJ didn't know what to do with her, Rian didn't know what to do with her.

She looks cool though.

 

Whether or not she should have been more than she was or not doesn't change the fact that what she was wasn't enough to make defeating her that big of a deal to much of the audience. I mean, I'm not even sure she's on Admiral Piett's level, and they didn't make it Han's big story achievement to kill him, they gave that to some nameless Rebel pilot we had never met before, or if you prefer the credit can go to Admiral Ackbar, another new and relatively minor character.

 

Not knowing what to do with alot of ST characters is a running joke now among the fandom.

But it’s like Boyega said, they didn’t give certain characters like Finn nuance. While giving it to others. Execution was bad, though a lot of elements were there when needed. But they weren't.


But if Boyega is calling all this now, why wasn’t he during the first script reading? Or during production onset?

Was so much of it taking out during editing?

 

Who's to say he didn't? We know they didn't change how they wrote Luke Skywalker just because Mark Hamill voiced his concerns. Seems unlikely that John would have more pull than that when it comes to how they wrote Finn.

 

One thing’s for sure. Boyega ain’t working for Disney or Star Wars anytime soon.

Unlike KMT.

 

This was a hilarious read. Every talking point from these forums rolled in one interview. is John Godisawesome? But anyway, after he called JJ "my boy" I was, like, Bye Felicia and stopped reading. How do you go from "TLJ didn't know what to do with Kelly?" (????) to "Leave my boy alone, he somewhat salvaged the movie he didn't want to make" (paraphrase) where his boy reduced Kelly to a cameo? Top kek. Also, kek at putting Oscar in Team Unappreciated Diversity since Disney did everything in their power to elevate his status, much of it due to Oscar's suggestions (don't kill Poe, take him out of the cockpit, give him a scene with dead Leia). yeah, hilarious and that's all I'm ever going to say on this topic.

 

I recall Boyega complaining about the marketing years ago, so it's not actually the first time for him to bring up that point.

It goes back to the larger point I and others have made about baiting and switching and zig zagging throughout the making of this 'story' across the three films and lack of setups and lack of payoffs (or just got bad ones). What they did w/ Finn early on was in hindsight a small warning of what was to come.

Finn had the second most amount of screen in the aggregate in these new movies, but it wasn't as important screen time as Driver and Ridley received.

 

I'm so glad John Boyega is speaking his truth. He's only saying things many in fandom have said for years. No matter how one feels about TLJ or what they enjoyed, the Black actor in the film is speaking his story and I think it's time the fandom acknowledges that that is his truth. The trilogy treated Finn horribly.

 

Driver and Ridley play characters that are force sensitive and related to legacy characters. I sure would hope they have the most important screentime based on how the PT/OT treated legacy characters.

 

Except this is a trilogy that is trying to market that being "nobody" is just as important - if not moreso - than being related to a legacy. Who is the Nobody? That's Finn. He's the Nobody even more than Rey was. Both he and Rey were "nobodies" in TFA and TLJ. For all the arguing over how Rey not being a nobody ruins her character, the trilogy HAD A NOBODY. It was Finn. And they chose to sideline and ignore him. There's no reason he couldn't have been a Jedi with Rey, or have a proper Stormtrooper arc. The fact is LFL decided it wasn't worth anything, while also trying to say "Nobody Heroes are important"!