My thoughts exactly. I don’t believe in fate or destiny (in the sense of not having control over my own actions or future) in the real world, why should I believe it in a movie? You could have every crazy, unrealistic technology, alien, magic, planet, setting, whatever; but if your story robs the characters of their free will, it’s a bad story. I mean, it’s the whole reason the original trilogy works. It’s a crazy, science fantasy world, with “space wizards” (how I hate that term), and half-baked technology that wouldn’t really ever work, but the characters act like real people would. That’s why Rogue One doesn’t work for me. Jynn Erso doesn’t have any choice in that movie. She makes no hard decisions. When people use the excuse “it’s the will of the Force”, or that the “Force used so-and-so to do such-and-such”, it ruins everything about Star Wars. I personally liked the fight in TFA. It worked for me—she had fighting skill enough to hold her own (and I really don’t think Star Wars is the kind of series where you really need to analyze someone’s fighting style to see if it’s staff-based or not), and the fact that Kylo was injured was enough. From a grand story perspective, I agree that it was a mistake to have her win there—not because she couldn’t have a win, or because she “wouldn’t be able to—but because it showed no foresight by the story creatives on what we had to look forward to in the rest of the trilogy. I liked the fight as a scene, not ultimately as a story beat. It was certainly a lot better than any fight in the prequels, to my taste.
And that’s ultimately what this all comes back to. This “will of the Force” crap came about during the prequels to excuse bad, poorly thought-out writing, and I’m very sad to see it resurface here. I can’t help but think of the Plinkett reviews by Red Letter Media, whenever someone in the prequels says something they shouldn’t know. “How do you know that? Did you read the script? Oh, I guess it’s the will of the Force that (fill in the blank).”
And you can link to as many different sources and videos and articles as you want from George Lucas; you can find documents as far back as 1975 about the Force “controlling people”, and it will NEVER change my mind. If you think that just because Lucas says it’s so will affect me, then there are three films and a cartoon I’d like to introduce you to that mean squat to me. Lucas doesn’t entirely understand the appeal of Star Wars, mostly because half of what makes the OT good didn’t even come from him. Pulling quotes from Papa George and other such “established canon” mean nothing to me.
