ST Finn/John Boyega Discussion Thread

I've maintained that Finn as a jedi hasn't been my direct perception of the character's direction. I think I like more sticking with what I think makes the character different that has more palpable dramatic and interesting storytelling, in showing the character, someone whose been raised to be faceless drone now acting on free will struggle with his past and figure out who he is and what he wants to do, and if he can even really be anything other than what he was raised to be and comes to the perception that he wants to use his suffering and blessing of God given free will to ensure that others don't suffer like he did.

However, I think there's something powerful about the idea of Finn, after going through everything I just said... standing up in front of other lost and broken people who've been raised to be nothing but cogs in the first order machine as stormtroopers, holding up a lightsaber (maybe Obi-Wan's) and saying, "I can be a jedi. You can be whatever you want to be. You have a choice." and rallying them to fight back against the first order.

 

But without any Force powers?

I find it interesting that when the trailer for "The Force Awakens" had first hit the theaters, so many had been upset over the idea of a black man as a stormtrooper. Now, many fans are arguing against the idea of Finn being Force sensitive. Why is Finn not allowed to be Force sensitive?

 

We know why…

 

I don't really care if he is force-sensitive. but i ain't gonna pretend it doesn't seem abit like an admission of them not knowing what else to do with the character. and honestly i don't buy it can just be another coming-of-age jedi story and act like its unique for this character.

 

This is a major structural issue with the ST that I don't see explicitly talked about enough. The war and the force plots don't inform each other at all on any level (they don't need to be so separate at all!), characters' journeys simply do not intersect or buttress each other. SEVERAL principal characters never interact at all. Storylines don't converge, major events in one area of the story don't affect the other storylines, relationships between characters are ultimately secondary to the idiosyncrasies of each individual storyline.

It clearly ties back to the fact that there is simply no broader vision for what the ST story is even supposed to be. You see this a lot with the way RJ talks about TLJ, how he was so focused on taking each character on an individual basis rather than integrating all these storylines together in any kinda meaningful, overarching way (well, he does at least kinda try in some thematic respects, but he undermines his own themes by not constructing a good plot/story to support them).

It also just makes the ST significantly less satisfying purely on an entertainment level.

 

To me, that kinda sounds like a them problem.

 

I say this all the time. In the ST, the Force plot and the War plot feel like two entirely different movies, largely because of how isolated Rey and Kylo become from everyone else in the latter films. There was some degree of separation in the OT and PT, but there was always enough connective tissue to make them feel relevant to one another.

Rey's journey is written almost entirely as this personal story of self-discovery, where all of her goals and actions revolve around herself for most of the trilogy (finding companionship or discovering her own origins is the most major thrust of TLJ and TROS). There's nothing inherently wrong with that on the surface, but combining self-centered goals with total isolation from the "normies" leads to a protagonist that lacks true humanity to me.

Luke, Anakin, and Rey are all established as exceptional pilots in their first film, but where Luke and Anakin go on to become ace pilots for their respective causes, Rey just kinda never uses those abilities again. Finn constantly gets **** on for not immediately pledging his life to the Resistance, meanwhile Rey is allowed to coast through the entire trilogy without even speaking to anyone in the Resistance or helping them in any way militarily. Luke and Anakin were willing to fight alongside the common man in the trenches, but 99% of the ST is just Rey ****ing about with Kylo and being an exceptionally gifted outsider.

LF's bizarre decision to separate Rey and Kylo away from literally everything and everyone else just made Rey feel like an unrelatable, selfish robot IMO.

 

Luke and Rey have similar motivations on the surface in ANH/TFA (a vague hatred for the Empire/FO, a desire to develop their force powers), but we never see those motives develop for Rey the way they do for Luke. We never get to see those motivations drive Rey's story, or, as the protagonist, the story in general.

Actually, she does have one unique personal motive even in TFA: her friends. She wants to help her new friends (after it's made clear she hasn't had any) BB-8, Finn, and Han.

In the OT, Luke's devotion to his friends, Han and Leia, is as crucial to his motives as his desire to develop his force powers and confront his father. We see moments where Luke helps both them and the rebellion at large, and even moments where Han and Leia rescue Luke, both in ESB. The entire first act of ROTJ basically puts the main story on pause to rescue Han, but it largely works because Han and his relationship to the other main characters is absolutely central to Luke's story.

We're told the resistance and Finn (and Leia) are meant to be kinda a "found family" after Rey spends the entire first movie trying to find her family/where she belongs. Despite this, her relationships to Finn, Poe, and Leia are not developed in TLJ, they don't influence her decisions. Her and Luke don't even know about the resistance's time crunch situation. It's all about Kylo. RJ tries to add a veneer of strategic thinking to Rey's decisions to try and turn Kylo ("this is how we win!") but it's definitely not emphasized. It's weird

 

That wasn't my point. Regardless of whether you like or dislike those scenes, they weren't between two people capable of autonomous actions: they were between two characters whose dialogue, actions and everything and anything is made by real-life people. Same with everybody and everything else in any of the films.

Although the Star Wars universe may be free from real-life bigotry and biases, it is still made by real-life people who bring to the stories their own biases, blindspots and experiences.

Basically, yes, real-life gender and race is irrelevant in the Star Wars universe but not in ours and as real-life humans are the people who write, produce, fund and promote the stories, this means that things like gender and different ethnicities can and do become influential, and sometimes downright defining, characteristics, sometimes conciously and very often subconciously.

This is just a fact of creative media, regardless of whether we as the audience or we as the creators wants it to be.

EDIT: Daxon101

 

Since they shoved Rey into a romance with Kylo Ren when the only "hint" happened during him literally torturing her, that effectively kills the argument that Kylo Ren wouldn't care about Finn because there was no build-up in the first film.

That aside, there actually do exists significant moments between the two, which may be the remnants from the gradual demotion Finn saw over the course of the production.

1. The Village Scene

At the tail-end of the Tuanul massacre, Kylo Ren is walking away when suddenly he starts to slow his pace and then he turns, the music turning from foreboding to dramatic as well as seeming to indicate something shocking or at least, something noteworthy*

2. The Desertion Scene

During the conversation between Hux and Kylo Ren while Finn and Poe are trying to escape, it's shown that Kylo Ren knows Finn's identification number. The way he says also seems thoughtsome. There's also the choice of his tone of voice and his body language (him stepping "away" as if pondering or sensing)

This is a scene which significance may have been either reduced in the film or comes across clearer in the script.

Hux: "We're checking the registers now to identify which Stormtrooper it was."
Kylo Ren: "... The one from the village. FN-2187"
Hux is unnerved that Ren knows -- he chalks it up to Ren's Force ability.

3. The Forest Scene

After Rey is knocked unconcious, Kylo Ren doesn't just keep going because his actual target is out and the only standing in the way is someone insignificant. No, he stops and shouts at Finn, with clear emotion in his voice, that Finn is a traitor.

Not only does Kylo Ren remember and recognize Finn, Finn invokes a strong emotional response.

*I suspect this part of the scene was originally meant to signify that Finn was force-sensitive, something that the shoytlist heavily implies that Finn was meant to be at some point in production. This also explain the following scene between Kylo Ren and Snoke:

Snoke: "There's been an awakening. Have you felt it?"
Kylo Ren: "Yes."

That exchange was meant to be a call-back to this moment.

In the shotlist. Finn was also not only fairly good with the lightsaber, he was actually drawn towards it.
INT DAY - 212 - CASTLE - UNDERGROUND CHAMBER • Finn is drawn toward the object, Rey repelled by it. She bolts

It could explain why Finn was consistently promoted with Luke's lightsaber during the marketing for the film if it was initially intended to be his deal for the film. Of course, that doesn't justify why the marketing didn't change to reflect the changed story.

In the shotlist, Finn and Rey both battle Kylo Ren at the same time (the description of some points emphasizing Rey's importance due to her being the primary protagonist)

In the script, the joint battle was changed into two separate battles. However, unlike in the film, Finn fights well and even "clearly IMPRESSES KYLO REN, who only enjoys this challenge more!"

Source(s):
https://imsdb.com/scripts/Star-Wars-The-Force-Awakens.html
https://web.archive.org/web/20170515233940/http://millenniumfalcon.com/

 

But if a guy tortures you it means he thinks you’re sexy.

 

Even after all these years, there's still a part of me that just cannot believe that they actually wrote a romance between a woman and the man who tortured her (and that's before all the other nonsense concerning the relationship is factored in)

 

There are plenty of actual, published romance novels with stuff like that in them. There's....an extremely controversial term for that sort of thing but it's not something that can be discussed on the internet without, ah, things getting extremely heated.

 

They would rather romanticize abuse and say that Rey and Kylo has this "special bond" than a positive blossoming romance between Finn and Rey. Sure, forget about the only guy that cared enough to face his fears and willingly choose to come back for you. Run to the guy that takes advantage of your mind, body and spirit then tells you "You have no place in this story. You're Nothing". It's so bad that its amusing. Like a romantic parody.

 

TROS has a whole scene where she fights with Poe about this very thing, and then there's never really a resolution to it. She just keeps trying to ditch everyone until she finally succeeds and that's the story.

 

The whole "ditch" thing flat out turned me against her character for good. After she force pushed finn on the "death star", it was a wrap for me.

 

Yeah that felt like a reshoot or something; no way did JJ want to write/shoot something like that. John’s defense of JJ says a lot.

 

Did she no push him to protect him, to stop him getting involve in the fight?

 

I know why she pushed him. It was still a very lame and cliche event. Of course having the shots focus on jannah and finn watching in awe as the two "special" characters super leap away, didn't help things one bit.