It still bothers me that Kylo Ren never used the Force against Finn. I mean, we’re talking about the guy who’s been shown doing this
and this
and this
also this
and so much more to his enemies and even people who just kind of annoyed him in the moment. The dude has oodles of Force power and is not at all shy about throwing it around. Other Force users are not immune, as shown with Rey who is even more powerful than he is.
So why, in his fight against Finn at the end of TFA, did Ren never even try to use the Force? Finn went running to an unconscious Rey after Ren knocked her out. Finn had even thrown his blaster aside, not that blasters work against Ren as Poe found out at the start of the movie. Why didn’t Ren throw Finn against a tree, too, or lift him into the air and choke him? That’s more like the guy’s usual MO.
Instead Ren not only dueled Finn but even resorted to punching him after disarming him, which had viewers commenting that his animosity against Finn seemed very raw and personal. It is true that Ren seems to have a personal beef against Finn (link), but again, the new Supreme Leader of the First Order has never been hesitant to use Force power against people regardless of how well he knew them or how strongly he felt about them. He revels in making people, from total strangers to hated rivals, helpless with his power. So why not Finn?
My hypothesis is that there’s another layer to Ren’s animosity against Finn beyond the usually-discussed ones of Finn defecting and making the opposite choices he did, and Ren’s hatred being the manifestation of his regrets. That’s a valid point and I have argued it myself (link), but what if there’s something more immediate and visceral going on?
Let’s go back to that moment in the village near the beginning of TFA, when Ren stared for a long moment at Finn before he turned away. He then unfreezes Poe’s blaster beam to strike a pole Finn was standing near, startling him and showering him with sparks.
Another thought came to me in relation to this theory. Didn’t John say that the massacre of Tuanul wasn’t enough for Finn to break his conditioning and bolt? What if this encounter with Ren was enough to do it? If that staring match happened as I theorize Finn would have had the additional kick of raw terror, both for Ren’s rage and what might be awakening in himself. If Finn felt Ren trying to read his surface emotions and also felt the effort fail, he would have known from Ren’s displeasure afterward that he was a goner if he stayed.
Come to think of it, if Finn is Force-immune (or a wound in the Force, as @themandalorianwolf theorizes) that would also explain how his many doubts flew entirely under the radar in an organization led by Force users. His inner turmoil would have been invisible to Force senses, and it wasn’t until Kylo Ren focused specifically on this particular Trooper that the truth came out.
So Finn is Force sensitive right? Right. But it still needs to be confirmed/revealed in 9. How?
I’ve been thinking it might be kinda cool if they did a callback to how Luke heard Obi Wan telling him to use the Force during the Death Star run but this time with Luke talking to Finn.
I’m just spit balling here but from the leaked pics we know that Finn, Poe and Chewie go somewhere in the Falcon. There’s no way to know when in the movie those scenes are going to be but for the sake of this speculation I’m going to assume (based on nothing, lol) that they are close to the beginning. So Finn, Poe and Chewie are in the Falcon on their way to whatever planet we see them on in the pics. On their way there they fall under attack. Poe and Chewie fly the ship while Finn mans he gun since, as we saw in TFA, he’s an ace gunner. The Falcon takes a hit that knocks out the targeting thingy on his gun. Finn fires sans targeting thing and misses, he starts to panic a bit as they are losing shields and won’t be able to take many more hits. Then all of a sudden Finn hears a calm voice: “breathe, just breathe….now use the Force Finn”. He does and destroys the last target in one shot.
Anyway…obviously this is complete speculation. I have no idea how FS Finn is going to be revealed in 9. It had just better happen early on and Finn better actually get to use the Force in 9.
This would be amazing and I think Mark Hamill, being one of John/Finn’s biggest supporters, would be into it.
In The Last Jedi, Boyega says, Finn’s reasonable facility with the saber is not further explicated. “But you never know,” he says. “I talk to Mark Hamill sometimes and he tells me stories about how he wasn’t told about the ‘Darth Vader is his father’ situation until he got on set.
I always felt like Mark was trying to reassure John that he could still be FS. They both seemed disappointed that they didn’t get to share screen time in TLJ. But since that’s done and can’t be changed (unless JJ retcons, which I would be equally cool with), it would make it even more powerful if Luke spoke to Finn through the Force in EpIX.
That’s an interesting–and disheartening–dichotomy. In fact I can’t think of a lot of Black men/white women romances on the big screen in general. There was a discourse about John as a romantic lead a little while back and I’ve been thinking since then, do even undisputed superstars like Denzel Washington and Will Smith count as romantic leads? Will had Mr. Hitch and Denzel had… The Preacher’s Wife? They both have amazing filmographies and commercial success that few actors of any race could rival and yet I don’t think they could be called romantic leading men like Leonardo Dicaprio or Brad Pitt. It seems to be a combination of Hollywood’s distaste for both interracial romances and Black leading women.
There have been several films that Denzel should have had a romance with the co-lead, but because she was white they nixed it because test audiences didn’t like it.
Will, among many other black actors, has had the love interest changed from the original casting call (black) to someone more racially ambiguous to appeal to audiences (usually mixed with light skin or non-black Latina) by studios.
Hollywood is a mess and it’s still in so many ways operating on the 80s & 90s scale of what sales and what won’t, even though a lot of people want better. All I can say is I hope John is able to break that mold. Or at the very least put some more dents in it. He’s on the right track with starting his own production company to make an impact.
Depending on the count Finn had equal screen time as Rey or more in TFA, so the reduction was entirely in TLJ. And a sizeable number of TLJ stans don’t think Finn was a protagonist in the first place–I’ve heard him compared to Qui-Gon Jinn or Mace Windu–so to them that’s just the way things should be.
The mentor who died in one movie or the only black Jedi they know.
Finn’s screentime was reduced by about 20 minutes compared to TFA…
In TFA Finn and Rey were miles above everyone else in screentime, and storywise clearly were the co-protagonists, with Finn actually actively starting the entire story …
TLJ retconed that. For that alone the movie is awful. (Not to mention there was more Finn material filmed, important material in fact that RJ cut for unknown reasons *cough*)
The entire Kylo show btw doesn’t result from Kylo having gained significant screentime.. his screentime stayed pretty much the same compared to TFA but Finn in particular and also Rey lost a lot of theirs. This explains the shift of the focus, together with the fact they Rey’s storyline is mostly about poor Ben and not herself, and Finn’s is literally filler material.
Finn has approximately 7 deleted scenes, 8 if you count whatever scene this flight suit came from. What I find weird though is how Finn’s cut scenes aren’t short things the film can do without like Kylo staring out a window, they’re actual character driven scenes.
It also strikes me as odd Finn is the only character to have an entire alternant scene! Which makes me think that this version of Finn’s confrontation with Finn is from an entirely different character arc.
tbh I’ve had a particular horror vision in my head for a while… and this vision says that John expected a totally different film in terms of Finn’s arc. That even more things that we don’t know about were filmed and then scrapped as soon as Johnson was in the cutting room … Like RJ couldn’t get away with minimizing Finn’s role to this degree while filming but then once this was over, he could wield the scissors and rearrange everything until it fit more to his original idea, ie. Finn as the comic relief who doesn’t do that much. And then John saw the movie and realised what was done to his arc and couldn’t do anything about it.
Maybe. Could be possible. No one just has that many deleted scenes. Also put in mind that Finn in his flight suit-
Has a different haircut than the rest of the movie and this footage was taken during principal photography. Now I’m not sure if everyone knows this, but hair doesn’t grow overnight, especially hairstyles like that. Us african folks ain’t a chia pet. John woudnt just show up to set with a different cut. He would have to of cleared this look. That means John potentially has an entirely different group of scenes that were changed in re-shoots.
Yes! It makes no sense for him to turn up to filming with a completely different haircut! Look at how early he started growing out his hair for IX even before we knew that’s what it was for! Training for TLJ started shortly after the end of the TFA promotion, so why on earth should he get a haircut during this period if it wasn’t for the movie?
Also wasn’t Rose’s background story initial in the movie and they then reshot the scene and left it out?
Also this is John during the promotion of the Force Awakens. Different haircut, particularly visible bc it’s longer and the line in his hair is on the other side, unless the footage from TLJ shooting is mirrored for some reason but I don’t know why that should be the case.
Usually when people get that type of haircut, the line is on both sides for balance.
I really don’t know why anything happened. I just know that there had to of been some changes, even JJ admits that he changed parts of the TFA script because he didn’t like them or the implications.
Timeline-wise, one of the first things to get leaked about tlj was the filming of John and Kelly “getting flirty” on what we now know to be a Falthier and that photo was released in March of 2016 iirc. It’s my opinion that the casino plot on Canto Bight was Rians top priority for Finn.
My tin foil hat is on, but I don’t think rian ever had many alternative ideas for Finn. I don’t know who is responsible for coming up with Finns arc on the supremacy, or for the plot involving Finn fighting alongside Paige, but it is unlikely to have come from Rian himself. I don’t even think Rian was present while shooting the Finn vs Phasma duel—I have to double check this, but I believe the secondary director was there filming that. And we have bts footage of Rian observing daisy and Adam training, but nothing of John.
Yeah I’ve looked in BTS and there’s not jack of Johnson, and I mean even the throne room scene is more about Kylo then Rey.
Johnson just wants to be Kylo.
Considering nothing
If what @reys–speeder says is true, and @themandalorianwolf provides at least partial confirmation, it may explain something I noticed about the TLJ novelization (link): The Finn-Phasma duel is very different in a number of small details from the version in the novelization. At the time I thought this might simply be the nature of action scenes, but then I read the throne room scene and no jarring discrepancies jumped out at me, at least none that I could spot from memory alone. If Johnson didn’t film and possibly didn’t even write the Finn duel that may explain the extra “drift” from the script.
Also, the second unit director generally doesn’t film scenes with the primary cast but rather films background characters and large-scale battles. The duel was a pivotal scene for Finn that featured him prominently. If it’s true that Johnson left the scene to the second unit he was treating Finn as effectively a background character and not a part of the main cast.
Is this about his project with Sebastian Thiel (link)? It looks exciting! It’s unfortunate that SW dominates everything to the extent John’s other projects aren’t even known, making it look as though he isn’t working. There may also be an attention gap at work between Hollywood action movies (even aside from SW) and projects by less-established directors outside the U.S.
As far as I know his longer hair is about SW, since he mentioned it in direct connection with Episode IX, but I’d love it if it’s for his other projects as well. 🙂
I’m not sure if I have the Instagram story where John has the wig he wore at the Met Gala taken off, but in it he talks about how the longer hair he has is very practical when you’re playing a character who has to change his hair length drastically over a short period of time. Then the story concludes with “no, this is not about Star Wars”.
I mean, John knows his NDA and that he can’t talk about anything about Finn that isn’t cleared, so even without that last disclaimer any hint of that being about Finn was minuscule. (Heck he couldn’t even confirm Lando before it was official though at the time he was asked almost every major outlet including the bloody Telegraph had run an article about it.)
But this just makes the hair thing all the more interesting, because John wasn’t posted anywhere to be recording anything. Except the voice of Bigwig in Watership Down, but that’s an animated movie and Bigwig is a damn rabbit. No hair involved there.
So what was John shooting before the shoot of IX began?
I guess that puts the “he’s not getting jobs” anons a little while back in more context. These are legitimate fears, but it sucks that these well-founded fears can go way too far and just work in a self-perpetuating conspiratorial loop. Unfortunately there’s too much racist media history to point to draw from, too.
Pacific Rim 3 was Greenlit and John is producing it like he did uprising.
Think that I touched a nerve with my tweet. About Reylos friendzoning Finnrey and how it would be funny if Rey and Kylo turned out to be related. Now they’re jumping on my tweet bringing up to me what Daisy said about Finn and Rey being brother and sister.
All the more reason why my tweet stands. Imagine the meltdowns if Kylo and Rey were related. lmao!
Honestly, the petty side of me would love that meltdown
What is hilarious is that Daisy was talking about her and John, not about Finn and Rey, when she said that bit about brother and sister. But acknowledging that would mean they’d have to take seriously that Daisy does indeed care and care deeply about John.
Funny how they come up with (fake) reasons to say it would be an abomination for Finn and Rey to have sex 🤔
L.J.'s Obsessions 