Finn finally speaks in the newest Force Awakens TV spot
The fifth and newest TV spot for Star Wars: The Force Awakens boasts something that was absent from every one of the film’s previous TV spots or theatrical trailers. (And, no, it’s not a decent shot of Luke Skywalker. Unfortunately.) It’s something that you might not have even relalized was missing until now: John Boyega’s voice. The 30-second ad is the first to focus primarily on the fugitive stormtrooper’s storyline, and as such we finally get to hear him utter a few quick bursts of dialogue. “You don’t know a thing about me,” he solemnly declares to somebody or other sitting just to the right of the camera frame. “What I’ve seen. We all need to run.”
What’s interesting about his dialogue is that it’s delivered in an American accent that is completely unlike the thick South London accent that many fans will remember him affecting in 2011’s Attack the Block. This confirms accounts—specifically from the mouth of an action figure—that producers made a specific choice have the 23-year-old London-born actor’s character be a space-American, like most of the leads in the original trilogy. It should be noted that, as we’ve learned in earlier trailers, the film’s other lead, the also-English Daisy Ridley, gets to be space-British.
Some other cool things to take note of while forensically analyzing this half-minute melange of partially-new footage: Finn has a lightsaber fight with a surprisingly-non-feckless-looking stormtrooper sporting some kind of an arm-mounted weapon; poor BB-8 gets knocked around inside the Millennium Falcon, probably in the midst of those aerial acrobatics we first saw in the teaser trailer last year; and Chewbacca detonates some kind of explosive device with Wookiee fingers that are much more articulated than we’ve yet been lead to believe. We’re learning so much about this universe!