I have seen some pretty interesting variants on the Finn’s suicide run sequence, and darthrush’s recent work (which I really like) got me thinking of some other alternatives. I might eventually try one of these but it might be useful to someone on here as well.
My motivation for the alternatives is that I kind of feel that we need to see Rose get injured and carried back to the base, because it might be noticeable to not to see her at all in the last ten~ minutes of the film. So these options retain that.
In darthrush’s version, he has Finn getting shot by an AT-M6 right before he makes it there. It looks very good! This first idea is an addition to that idea. Before we see Finn make his run, one could possibly construct a moment where Rose also gets shot down by an AT-M6. Several other ships get shot down before Poe orders them to retreat, so you could use one of those shots, and a reaction shot of Rose to help sell it.
After Finn gets shot down, he runs back to go find her (and see if she’s dead). He finds her, and this is optional I guess, but I think you could keep the kiss in this moment. They failed their mission, all hope seems loss, and Rose probably thinks they’ll die, so I can understand why she would feel compelled to have one last kiss. And I think it would flow well into the “all hope is lost” speech Leia gives less than a minute later. The only other thing I think would help sell this idea would be to add some kind of reaction from Poe or Finn to Rose getting shot down.
Another option would still retain Rose being the one to knock Finn out of the way. I definitely think shortening his approach to help alleviate the expectation of his death would help, and I know people have or will be attempting this. To help improve Rose’s motivation, though, I think it would be interesting to move the moment she looks at her necklace and touches it to right before she goes back to stop Finn in order to set that up.
This could give the impression that Rose feels if she could save Finn, then in a way, it would be like she was saving her sister. Saving what she loves. It would be nice if you could have the cannon fire almost as soon as they get knocked out of the way, too, to show that he really would’ve failed, but I’m not sure how possible that is. Personally, I think you could cut all of her lines and just have her be unconscious in this version. Or just keep the “saving what you love” line, and maybe the kiss. If you really wanted to keep those things.
This idea could be used for either as well, but I also think adding some kind of red, dusty particle effect to a lot of those shots could help imply that maybe they were able to make it back the base because they were almost concealed by the red dust in the air.
Anyway, just some thoughts.