Director Rian Johnson has taken some blaster fire for cutting poignant scenes of John Boyega’s Finn from The Last Jedi, and his explanation doesn’t leave me feeling any better about his choices.
Johnson is the director here and he’s entitled to do what he wants with his Star Wars movie. But, as Digital Spy points out, an awful lot of the deleted scenes emerging in anticipation of the movie’s DVD release are Finn-based:
[…] we couldn’t help notice that a lot of them feature John Boyega’s Finn.
There’s the alternate opening that features Finn. There’s Finn’s alternate, extended fight with Captain Phasma. And there’s the various scenes of Finn in First Order uniform infiltrating Snoke’s flagship, the Supremacy.
All of these scenes would’ve gone a long way towards correcting the imbalance of attention Finn was given in The Last Jedi—and, I believe, they would’ve made for a stronger movie. An extended fight/interaction with Phasma was something I desperately wanted for the development of both characters: not only did Phasma feel wasted, but Finn’s history with her could have been so much more richly explored so that the fight really meant something.
More scenes of Finn on the Supremacy would’ve just frankly made more sense, since Finn and Rose spend the entire movie plotting this complicated infiltration that then fizzles out in mere minutes. But many fans were especially disappointed at the lack of connection drawn between Finn and Rey, who were together for almost the entirety of The Force Awakens.
Yet it seems Johnson cut references to Finn and Rey … because Finn’s scenes were too “connective.” Hmm.
“A lot of the Finn scenes that were cut are connective material,” [Johnson] said. “For instance, there’s a scene where he’s on the ship, and BB-8 comes in and shows him… basically, BB-8 shows him a recording he made of Rey saying goodbye to him. That’s when he decides, ‘Oh my God, I’m going to go save Rey’.
“In a scene like that, it was totally lovely. But once we realised that we could take it out and the audience would know he’s holding Rey’s beacon, and ‘oh, he’s going to save her’, and they would make that leap – suddenly, you can’t justify that scene being there.”
A “totally lovely” scene where BB-8 shows Finn a recording of Rey saying goodbye would’ve been super-poignant—and it would’ve allowed the later scene, when R2-D2 shows Luke the original Leia “help me Obi-Wan Kenobi” recording, to mirror it nicely.
Mostly, however, it’s hard for me to understand why it’s impossible to justify a scene like Johnson describes being included in movie that already runs for an indulgent 2 hours and 32 minutes. You can’t make the argument that there wasn’t time for something like the Finn/Rey scene in a film that has time for Luke Skywalker to milk a thala-siren and then drink that milk. Or why not trim a bit of the side plot that no one asked for—Finn and Rose at the Canto Bight casino, and then riding space horses for what seems like ten years—to ground this vital character back into the main action?
Johnson also told Digital Spy:
“I think as opposed to Rey, where somebody like Rey had longer sequences on the island that were with Luke – with Finn, because his was a little more plotty in terms of it, there were more little scenes like that where we were like, ‘Oh, we can do without this, we can do without that’, and have his character arc still hold up.”
It sounds like Johnson is trying to say that Finn’s character held up despite the cuts—while Rey needed to have more established character development, like those seventeen hours of her meandering around the island following Luke. But even if it’s true that the audience was capable of following what Finn was doing without so much “connective tissue,” it doesn’t mean that we didn’t want deeper, more developed scenes of him.
Johnson is enthusiastic about John Boyega, saying, “You can see it in the deleted scenes, he’s freaking fantastic,” and “John Boyega at his worst is better than most people at their best.” Great! I don’t think that Rian Johnson has anything personally against the actor—he didn’t go around cutting these Finn moments out of spite.
But I do think that Johnson had no idea what to do with Finn’s character, especially in a movie laser-focused on developing an emotional bond between Rey and Kylo Ren. Many Finn fans—and fans of shipping Finn with Rey, or Finn with Poe—felt incredibly let down by the treatment of his character in The Last Jedi, which saw him almost completely cut off from the primary plot. Many of the memes and meta-commentary that emerged from fans are annoyed with Johnson for spending so much time on Kylo Ren to the detriment of its POC characters.
(via Tumblr)
I enjoyed The Last Jedi, though I wrote in my review at the time that the entire Finn/Rose adventure B-plot “could be axed in order to make The Last Jedi stronger and tighter, which is unfortunate.” Ironically, while Johnson seems to have cut many Finn moments that fans were longing to see—Rey sending him a message, Poe having sewn up his jacket, an extended Phasma fight scene—what we were given instead was an extraneous plotline that felt so unnecessary to his character development that anyone could have subbed in for Finn’s trip to Canto Bright and it wouldn’t have made a difference.
And I’ll never understand why there wasn’t space or time for these Finn moments that would’ve meant a whole lot. We would’ve sat there for 2 hours and 40 minutes, Rian, I promise. We were committed to the bit.
(via SyfyWire, Digital Spy, image: Disney)
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