J.J. Abrams and John Boyega weigh in on what Finn wanted to tell Rey in The Rise of Skywalker

Now that Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker's opening weekend has come and gone, leaving a box-office conquest in its wake, fans everywhere are busy contemplating and dissecting the many mysteries and loose ends left behind by the film. Some of these are clearly things that are ripe for Expanded Universe stories in novels, comics, and more, but others just might be more ambiguous, including one that seems to have just about everyone talking: What exactly was Finn going to tell Rey?

**Spoiler Warning: There are spoilers for Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker below.**

This particular mystery originates at the end of the speeder chase scene on Pasaana, when Finn, Rey, Poe, Chewie, and the Droids find themselves crashed into a sinking field. With nothing to help them pull each other out, they all start to go under, and a panicked Finn yells to Rey that there's something he never told her just before he goes under.

As the film goes on, both Rey and Poe ask Finn to explain what he was about to say, but he never does. It's an open-ended question by the end of the film, but context clues seem to point to two key possibilites in terms of what his near-death confession might have been. One of these is something that, for many fans, dates back to Rey and Finn's first interactions in The Force Awakens: the idea that Finn has romantic feelings for her, and has always struggled to admit it. Unfortunately, if you're a supporter of this theory, Finn himself, John Boyega, put that idea to rest on Twitter: 

The other key theory holds a bit more weight, if only because the film's creators haven't yet proved willing to offer a definitive answer. For some fans, Finn's near-confession coupled with various key decisions he makes later in the film on the basis of pure instinct — including targeting the correct Final Order ship to stop the fleet — means that he was going to tell Rey that he was beginning to feel the Force flowing in him. At an Academy screening of the film over the weekend, director and co-writer J.J. Abrams spent some one-on-one time with fans, and according to a couple of them, he said that he personally chooses to believe this theory. That said, Abrams also reportedly said that the question was purposefully left unanswered in the film so that different people could draw different meanings from it. 

Abrams' attempt to inject a little ambiguity into this particular part of the Skywalker Saga's ending might have been undercut a little bit by Boyega's own remarks about what Finn didn't say, but that doesn't stop fans from walking away with their own interpretations if they choose. And who knows? Maybe Finn didn't intend to say either of these things. Maybe he was really excited to tell Rey that he felt like he was getting better at the gunner position on the Millennium Falcon.