My oh my, this has gotten nasty...
@
The Wook, I'll add my voice to those saying it's fine you detest this film, but quit trying to convince us. I know you probably can't believe it from your viewpoint, but it
is possible to like this film -- a lot --
with full awareness of its provenance, flaws, factual errors... and none of the nonexistent faults you've gone on about repeatedly.
I still rank ANH and ESB as my favorite films ever!
And yet you can't even quote them correctly...
I'll tell ya "say's who?"! Yoda! He told us that only a fully trained Jedi can resist being seduced by the dark side.
Nyup. He said "Only a fully trained Jedi Knight, with the Force as his ally, will conquer Vader and his Emperor." Nothing about being able to resist the Dark Side. He then said, obliquely, that choosing the quick and easy path would lead to the Dark Side. One can parse a connection between those two statements, but it isn't what you explicitly state.
Regarding Rey...
I'm all for girl power [No you're not. -- I.P.], but the feminist movement is ill-served by studios creating heroines who know everything, who never struggle with their gifts, who never work at honing their gifts, and never make sacrifices along the way. Perhaps Rey will do that in Episode VIII, but it'll be too late. It should've happened in TFA. I love Daisy Ridley, and I posted on this thread previously that I think she did a fantastic job in the role--I just didn't like how her role was written to be so instantly all-powerful. I posted that I fell in love with Rey when she quipped to Finn, "That was lucky!". But my love for her was stunted time after time after time in the movie, by her absurd facility with the Force, just hours after learning of its existence.
It was absurd that she would know more about the Falcon than Han. Absurd, and insulting. They could've conveyed her impressive mechanical knowledge to the other characters in the film, and to us sitting in the theater, by having her know a lot about a stock Corellian YT1300 Freighter. But to know more than Han about the Falcon is just not credible. What did Han tell Luke and Obi Wan in ANH? He said, "I've made a lot of special modifications myself". This was Han's ship, that he customized. The scene should've had him correct the little know-it-all.
Let's see... When we meet her, she's barely scraping by as a junk scavenger. As the film unfolds, we get that she has (or at least had) a close association with Unkar Plutt, that seems to have soured at some point, and maybe gotten worse recently; and we also get the sense that were she not so tough and clever, she probably wouldn't have lasted.
Ex post facto knowledge lets us infer her strength with the Force contributed to her survival. She's determined and resilient, but definitely has had a hard time of it.
Her familiarity with that particular ship (without knowing its name) undoubtedly also comes from her time with Unkar Plutt. She was present for at least some of the modifications he made, as she disagreed with them. As @
kristenhenry70 said, Han was running into problems with the modifications made by at least one of the
three individuals who had had the
Falcon since he lost it, specifically a mod that she had been on hand for and knew how it was installed, so she was best placed to fix it.
As for sacrifices... Did you go to the bathroom or something -- both viewings -- when she had to consciously accept that her family was
gone, never coming back for her, most likely dead or they would have found a way in all that time? We watched her let go of all hope of ever seeing them again. Luke at least had the relatively quick closure of seeing the remains of his home and aunt and uncle. Rey had been waiting some fifteen years in vain. In my book, that counts as sacrifice. Plus, by the end of the film, she'd lost the new father-figure in her life, quite brutally, and in front of her eyes. Double whammy, coming pretty close on the heels of the first hit.
As far as you connecting lack of struggle or sacrifice to her Force training, her instincts were enough to resist Kylo's mind probe, and her lack of training is what saw her push back so hard she pushed the connection the
other way. I highly doubt she saw a mental file folder labelled "Jedi Mind Trick" so much as subconsciously gleaning something from when she was in there. Possibly more that will come out in the next film. She heard the radio chatter from the Stormtrooper standing guard and realized she wasn't alone in the room (she'd been testing her restraints). If you've never had your mind subconsciously connect two disparate data points, you can't relate, but I can see the "I want out of here" and "oh, there's someone in here" click on some level with her brain (or the Force) saying "you can tell
him to let you out". I'm also fine with the multiple tries. It is repeated through the film that she's
very strong with the Force (or vice versa, however it's supposed to be considered). I have
always gotten that a stronger Force-user can overpower a stronger mind.
And facing Kylo at the end... Well, @
Riceball does, in fact, know what the hell he's talking about. Finn's been trained his whole life for combat (if his squadmate is any indication, including melee weapons), and Rey's been honing her self-defense skills for a decade plus, emphasizing staff. Most of her lightsaber fighting uses modified staff forms, which made perfect sense to me. And you seem to
utterly discount the condition Kylo's in at that point of the story, and dismiss those who point it out. I hate to put these facts in the way of your narrative, but...
Oh, and speaking of not letting facts interfere with the narrative:
If you don't think Rey is a vessel for advancing Hollywood's liberal agenda, then you've got blinders on.
Funnily enough, Hollywood is quite the opposite. Small-c conservative. Look at all the sequels and remakes they've been doing, rather than take risks. Yeah, there are
some filmmakers who want to push the envelope, but it's hard to convince the studios to take the risk.
Here's the thing with strong female characters, and what Paul Feig doesn't get. The folks who made TFA did better than Feig, but still put too much emphasis on it.
Yes movies and TV need more leading characters of cultural subsets
other than caucasian males, but doing so isn't a liberal agenda. It is simply correcting an inaccuracy in the medium -- a blind spot where they lag behind the rest of society. @
Axlotl touches on what I'm getting at:
Why can't a franchise or property be inclusive for the sake of being inclusive?
I suppose "Sesame Street" was some kind of conspiracy, too?
How dare they have blacks and whites and latinos all living together on the same street!
And girls! Blech!.
The part of FInn was not written specifically for someone with dark skin. The part of Poe was not written specifically for a Latino actor. They're actually getting better about this. Personally, I look forward to the day that even character
names might not be set until the roles are cast, so that anyone -- male or female or black or white or brown or gay or missing a leg or whatever -- can try out for a part, and the casting people pick who truly fits the role best, and who clicks with the actors they'll be interacting with on camera. Sure, some characters can be written a specific way where it's germane to the plot or character growth, but I want to see more of what we got here -- women being cast in traditionally male roles, and it working (Phasma and the female Stormtrooper, etc.).
Now, moving on to other, less fraught, posts...
[regarding Avatar]The story is simple and weak - which seems to make it culturally palatable for foreign markets.
Okay, that makes zero sense to me. It's Pocahontas in space. It's the White Messiah story trope. How the hell is the "white man helping out the poor backwards natives who wouldn't have been able to defeat his people on their own" culturally palatable for foreign markets? :wacko
The film treatment could have been written by a well motivated 15 year old student.
Well, to be fair, the "treatment", as such, has been around for centuries. Take your pick of any pre-WWII colonial lit.
But you know what? The prequels still felt ambitious. Perhaps that's why you overlooked it. It felt like a new story. They may not have been entertaining but they were at least out of step with everything else going on in hollywood. TFA, does not.
The Prequels did not feel ambitious to me, except technically. What aspects felt like a new story to you? Not argumentative. Genuinely curious.
The trauma of watching a film that isn't 100% exactly what you wanted it to be is simply too much for some people.
This film wasn't 100% exactly what I wanted. I have quibbles that I'm turning my rewrite reflex to. But I still enjoyed the hell out of it the first four times I've seen it, and plan to keep going back as long as I can find a theater running it.
[amusing macro that never shows up in post quotes]
To be fair, Finn isn't her boyfriend. They're close, sure, but not in that way. Plus, we've been hearing for most of the year that she's going to be interested in Poe in Episode VIII.
--Jonah