The past is another movie, they do things differently there

I think trobadora put her fingers on why I enjoyed the new Captain Marvel movie without loving it in her review here. It got me thinking about another example where a set up that was, in theory, ideal to explore torn loyalties, inner character conflict, identity issues, fleshing out the antagonists (without excusing their deeds) was simply ignored because that wasn't what the movie wanted to be about, to wit: Star Wars: The Force Awakens with Finn.

It bears repeating: making one of the main characters a deserting storm trooper was, by itself, a brilliant idea. But then the movie went out of its way not to do anything with it. It gave us a throway line of dialogue to make it clear that despite having been raised a storm trooper, Finn never before the opening assault of the movie took part in any battle but worked in waste extraction. (So there's no blood on his hands.) The only other storm trooper we see him interact with in two movies so far is Phasma, and there's nothing but mutual loathing between them. He doesn't appear to have made a single friend throughout his life pre movie, and yet the way he interacts with Poe and Rey isn't that different as if he'd had Luke's backstory of growing up a farmboy on a backwater planet instead.

Now, I don't think I'm being unfair if I speculate that the reason for this is that the sequel producers and writers wanted to keep the storm troopers as easily killable canon fodder. (For similar reasons, I bet that whatever this new Amazon series set in the Lord of the Rings universe will include, it won't be a single orc deciding to go vegetarian and/or to hell with fighting.) If they'd shown Finn conflicted about going up against his former comrades, despite having come to regard their cause as utterly wrong, if they'd shown some of his former comrades hesitating before shooting, then you get Kevin Smith's famous "how many workers on the Death Star when Luke blew it up?", but in earnest. They wanted a feel good action movie without any divided feelings about the heroes' victory at the end, not something that goes "good that the day and the innocents were saved, but how sad that these characters who maybe could have changed sides just as Finn did in other circumstances are dead, too". (And they definitely did not want Finn pondering his personal responsibility for having served a fascist regime in the past, complete with flashbacks to him as part of a unit bullying and shooting people.)

( Spoilers about Captain Marvel to follow )