FINN – RESISTANCE FIGHTER

STAR WARS: THE LAST JEDI

Throughout the last week and a half of The Last Jedi reviews, there’s been one major player absent (well, apart from Leia, who actually wasn’t released): Finn.  He may not have been everyone’s favorite new character from TFA, but I personally really liked Finn.  There was a earnestness to him.  I’m happy (though hardly surprised) to see he’ll be back up and about for The Last Jedi.  Hasbro seems to have learned a bit from their experience last time around, and has put out only one Finn at launch, which I;ll be looking at today.

THE FIGURE ITSELF

Finn is part of the first basic series of The Last Jedi figures.  With the exception of the First Order Stormtrooper (which I didn’t get) Finn wraps up the Orange Assortment of heavy hitters.  Shots from The Last Jedi have shown Finn in a few different get-ups; the figure opts for what I assume will be his standard look in the film.  Essentially, he’s just wearing the same basic gear that Poe was sporting at the start of TFA.  We already know the jacket’s shared, so maybe Poe’s just loaning Finn more of his wardrobe?  Ultimately, it doesn’t look much different from Finn’s TFA look, but it’s a tiny bit more exciting, I guess.  The figure stands 3 3/4 inches tall and has the usual 5 points of articulation.  His sculpt is unique to him, but like a lot of the figures in this series, there’s some definite similarities to a few earlier items.  He looks not unlike a TFA Finn head placed on an Armor-Up Poe body.  He’s not, of course.  The head is a lot sharper and less cartoony looking than the prior Finns.  He’s even got John Boyega’s slight sly grin, which helps to better sell the likeness.  Definitely Hasbro’s best Finn head sculpt.  The body is decent enough.  I appreciate that he doesn’t just have the exact same build as the Poe figure, and I really dig how sharp all the details are.  This is the best that jacket’s looked on a small-scale figure.  Perhaps my favorite part of the figure is a very, very minor detail; the back of his jacket has a small stitched slash, showing where Finn was wounded by Kylo in TFA.  That’s a definite attention to detail, and also confirms that this is the original jacket and not just some sort of replacement.  Finn’s paint work is pretty basic stuff.  It’s well-handled; the lines are all clean, and the colors look to match pretty well with what we’ve seen of this outfit from the promotional images.  Finn is packed with his blaster he got from Han, which looks to be same piece included with all of the Jakku Finns.  If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, right?

THE ME HALF OF THE EQUATION

I didn’t buy Finn on Force Friday.  I saw him there (and when I found a set early), but I didn’t get him.  I guess he just looked too similar.  I almost got him when I needed another basic figure to qualify for the Target promotion, but he was sold out by that point, so I figured I’d make due with his TFA figure.  And then I opened up all of my Last Jedi figures, and the set just really didn’t feel right without a Finn.  Fortunately, within a few days, most of the stores around me had re-stocked, and I was able to grab this guy without much trouble.  He’s actually a fair bit different from his predecessors, and makes for a much better overall figure.