Yoda Is Your Father said:
But my point is Imperial stormtroopers, gunners, pilots and even officers have proven themselves to be a bit, shall we say ‘less than amazing at their jobs’ time and time again throughout the OT, so claiming that everybody in Ren’s unit would have been the ‘best of the best’ is a stretch.
Here’s how I see it. We can start with the stormtroopers in the OT. They are notoriously bad at aiming their blasters when they are shooting at our heroes. If it’s Jawas or disposable Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru, sure they are deadly. But if it’s Luke or Han or Chewie, OK their aim is not good and they can’t hit ****. Is that slightly silly? Sure, but it’s part of the Star Wars world and it’s a consistent tone throughout the OT. Unlike the battle droids in the prequels, at least they provide enough of a threat that our heroes still have to take care around them if they want to survive.
In TFA, however, Finn defies that consistency and the film moves from “slightly unrealistic” to “who cares it’s a movie” territory. Unlike the officer you cited at the beginning of Star Wars, or the stormtrooper who can’t aim, who are doing what you would expect them to (even if they are not doing it well enough) … Finn does something that is not expected of him. He does the opposite of what is expected of him. The reason is probably because someone decided in a script meeting that it would be a novel idea to have one of the Han/Leia/Luke characters be a stormtrooper, and everyone else said “oh yeah that’s brilliant let’s do it”. There doesn’t seem to be any effort to justify it in the rest of the script. It just happens and then the story moves on. Like I said, it feels like the story was written and directed by ten different people, and all their different pet ideas got into the movie, and everything was just pieced together with flim-flam one liners written back into the final draft.
Yoda Is Your Father said:
Besides, when we see Finn in action later in the film he is kinda badass - he knows how to hit a target (which is more than most stormtroopers), has no problem killing enemies when they pose an actual threat (i.e. they’re not unarmed villagers) and he’s pretty brave going up against Kylo Ren (when he’s just seen Rey get force-thrown against a tree and knows he’ll probably be beaten). He has clearly been well-trained. His desertion is, in my opinion, a moral choice, and a believable one at that. The First Order’s brain-washing of children can’t overcome the natural good in them… and isn’t that in line with the whole ‘light vs dark’ theme of the whole saga?
My problem with Finn is that he’s not a real character. He’s a plot device. In one scene he’s scared, and then without going through any kind of arc, he’ll randomly be brave and heroic in another scene just because the plot calls for it. One moment he might be reckless, and then another moment he’s calculating. When the plot calls for him to be selfish, he is selfish. And when the plot calls for him to be compassionate, he is compassionate. He wields a lightsaber and gets his butt kicked by a random stormtrooper, but then he wields a lightsaber and injures an experienced force user.
In short, Finn is just whatever the plot needs him to be at that moment. He’s a paper thin character, poorly thought out and unnecessarily inserted into the film.