No problem, google algorithms be damned.

 

Art is never objective, and the people who suggest otherwise are the least trustworthy authorities on it. If any art form were objective, if would cease to be an art and become a science.

Anyway, this isn't formal critique. This is like when Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King's family opines on what causes he would support today, or when a biopic is praised or criticized by the subject's close family. Or when Paul McCartney and Sean Lennon both say that John would've used autotune if he were alive today. There's generally not much room to snap back at those cases with an "oh yeah, where's your objective analysis?" External scrutiny can never capture what it is to know someone closely. They knew the actual person and we only knew their work and their public persona.

Marcia Lucas knows Star Wars in a way very few others ever can. She knew its creator very well. She knew the thought process, and more importantly the emotions behind it, because George was always telling her about it and checking his ideas with her. She knows the spirit behind Star Wars at its inception and not just from her personal interpretation of the work. She has a first-hand, gut level sense of what George would or wouldn't have done (and why!) that is a lot more relevant than any sort of labored analysis.

 

Marcia Lucas was an average opinionist, but she was a BRILLIANT editor.

 

There’s another thing to point out about Rey. If you toss out TFA, Rey ends up with roughly the same amount of Jedi training as Luke does by the end of TRoS.

Luke gets roughly a days worth of training from Obi-Wan in ANH. By the end of ANH he’s a gifted pilot, and by the start of ESB he’s capable of moving objects with his mind and sensing things in the force.

He gets an indeterminate amount of time with Yoda in ESB (I’ve seen it pegged at about a month), and that allows him to stand toe to toe with Vader at least for a while, move objects with his mind easily, and enhance his physical movements. He’s also able to reach out through the force to others.

There is no indication on film or in any EU materials I’ve ever read that Luke returns to Yoda until he goes to witness Yoda’s death. So on his own he gets to the point he can deflect blaster bolts by RotJ. From all we’ve seen on screen Luke has no more formal training between RotJ and Mandalorian, meaning the hallway scene is all Luke.

Rey is over the top in TFA. But after TFA she falls more in line with Luke. She gets roughly a week’s worth of training with Luke (more than Luke got with Obi-Wan) and she’s out of her depth with Snoke, and can only take on his Praetorian guard with Kylo’s help. She can move a large quantity of rocks with her mind at the end of TLJ.

At which point she gets training from Leia for a seizable amount of time. It’s likely more than Luke got with Yoda.

The Anakin comparison is different. He does get Jedi instruction, but he’s late to it. He’s 9 when he starts and is far far behind everyone. But he catches up and everything indicates he’s probably as powerful as Yoda, if not more powerful.

 

Luke already was a gifted pilot though. This was established when Obi-Wan told Luke that he heard he was an accomplished pilot, and if the scene hadn't been removed, confirmed again by Biggs before the battle of Yavin.

The problem that Rey has, that Luke and Anakin don't, is that she had no baseline to start with. When Lucas wrote Luke and Anakin, you get little hints from other characters describing their traits and abilities (not coincidentally they are both good pilots, and mechanic/tinkerers) at the start of their journey. When JJ wrote Rey, he did none of that. All we can rely on is what Rey tells us about herself, and a demonstration of her climbing and scrap-cleaning abilities. It's the whole "mystery box" style of writing JJ likes to use.

 

Luke used to target wimp rats in his T-16, so targeting the vent was no big deal.

 

And a quick search on the Star Wars wiki explicitly makes mention that the controls for the T-16 are similar to the X-Wing (both made by Incom) and the cited source is Episode IV itself.

 

Oh I'd agree that TFA is a problem. Rey does mention she's worked on the Falcon, and I seem to recall there's a line that's she's flown before. But in TFA she's way too over the top. You can't explain her without trying to point to some sort of quirky force mimic ability.

She gets more in line with reasonable power levels in TLJ. She spikes in power in TROS when JJ returns to the helm, but at least by then she's had some training to explain how she got to that point.

Yeah, Luke's piloting ability is established throughout ANH. It's not that out of left field. And in Star Wars, being an excellent pilot out of no where is kinda par for the course. Han and Wedge have some training in the Imperial Academy, but much of the material makes it clear that they already had a substantial amount of skill, without the force to help them.

Anakin's time as a podracer informs his later piloting skills, much like Luke's time with the Skyhoppers. For Anakin there's the added level of skill implied by the fact that TPM establishes podracing is something no normal human can do, meaning his force abilities are supplementing his natural skill.

I want to be clear, I'm very much in the camp that Rey is over the top in TFA. JJ has a thing for magic mystery girls. Rey and Sydney from Alias are cut from the same cloth. I'm just saying that once you're past TFA, Rey isn't as far out of line from where Luke and Anakin are in their journeys.

 

Ugh, Chewie’s scream when Kylo impaled Han just… stays with me. It probably could’ve been a lot worse, but just the guttural, violent roar coming from him was awful. He got me again in TROS when he found out about Leia, that hurt too.

 

Agreed. I am pretty sure JJ's writing philosophy is to just throw as much at the audience as quickly as possible. Which can be entertaining in the moment, but when you sit back and really think about some of his ideas, it falls apart.
So with Rey and the Falcon: she's apparently 19 years old in TFA (I had to look it up). As she and Finn are running she refers to the falcon as a piece of garbage that hasn't flown in years. But then they need it, so they run in, and everything happens to work pretty much perfectly in the falcon (it even starts up!). But then Finn says "we need a pilot!" and Rey replies almost immediately: "I'm A PILOT!" and then proceeds to pull some serious maneuvers to allow them to escape. It's a fun scene.

But then you think about it. Then you realize that the garbage ship that hasn't run "in years" worked almost flawlessly (flying-wise) so that a teenage girl, who, at best *maybe* flew it two or three years ago (when she was 16 or 17 years old) can fly the falcon as well as we've only seen Han or Lando do. In spite of the fact that both Han and Lando had co-pilots, and both owned the falcon, so they probably had tons more more flight time. But because Rey claims she's a pilot (even though the audience has only seen her basically ride a motorcycle at this point), she can deliver the goods.
And unfortunately, most everything else Rey does in that movie has no set up, aside when she's climbing walls to escape Starkiller base. That was actually a pay off from her earlier climbing!

 

Glad to see others mention Chewy's roars over Han and Leia's death in the sequels. Just heartbreaking, really got me in the theaters.

 

Yeah it really does.

 

So she is the equivalent of a wu xi protagonist or Final Fantasy blue mage?

 

I don’t know much about Wu Xi, but a blue mage learns via surviving the attack. Rey seems to just learn by seeing. Which is an ability that by any standard is overpowered. She’s like the force equivalent of Taskmaster from the comics.

 

Depends on the game. Bad wu xi protagonists, along with isekai protagonists now that I think about it, do the same thing.

 

Could we expect something about the Book of Boba Fett in November?

Star Wars: Boba Fett Special Announced for Disney+ (comicbook.com)

 

I would expect the marketing to start in October.

 

There's also a time span of three years between ANH and ESB. Three years during which Luke most likely repeated the training Obi-Wan taught him, deflecting lasers with his lightsaber. (Not cannon, but the Marvel comics at the time showed Luke doing this.) Although it's not the same as actually getting training, it would develop his connection to the Force.

The impression I get from ESB is that Luke using the force to move his lightsaber in the ice cave, was a giant leap in his abilities. Something he had never accomplished before but likely something he knew was possible thanks to hearing stories about the Jedi, and it still took great effort. To me this also shows in the Emperor, despite it being three years since Yavin, only only now being aware of Luke's abilities and contacting Vader stating they have a new enemy. I also think it was Luke moving his Lightsaber in the ice cave that furthered his connecting to and ability in the Force that enabled him to see Obi-Wan -- note that he sounds surprised to see Kenobi appear before him, still very hazy and unclear, as if this is something he never had seen before.

Regarding Vader, Luke definitely surprised him in his abilities, but Vader was clearly holding back at the start of the fight. This can simply be seen by Vader using only a single hand at the beginning and still overpowering Luke without much effort. Luke also never is a threat to Vader throughout the ESB fight. The element that I think is so great about the ESB fight is how utterly out of his depth Luke is in it. If he was fighting someone like Dooku or Maul...it would've been over in seconds. Only because Vader wanted Luke to join him and thus held back, did Luke survive.

I don't recall Luke moving objects easily in ESB. On Dagobah it still took him concentration and the slightest distraction made things go wrong. And during the fight, it took great effort for Luke and failing miserably, to deflect the things Vader threw at him. Only his lightsaber did Luke manage to retrieve without much effort during the fight.

There's again a time span, six months IIRC. Again time during which Luke most likely repeated the training exercises taught to him by Yoda. Also, we've only seen a few scenes of training but in the novelisation Yoda also had Luke deflect laser bolts...from multiple sources. Plus he was already taught this by Kenobi.

I loved seeing that -- it's the only part of the series I've seen -- but one thing I found great about it is that it reaffirmed my opinion that Luke was a very poor Jedi in abilities and training. Just compare Luke going through those battle droids to Prequel Jedi doing the same. Luke shows no finesse and no grace. He's a blunt instrument compared to PT Jedi who did the same faster and with grace.

That always felt a lot like JJA answering fan complaints: training after the fact. Rey in TLJ is without training and knowing about Jedi/the Force for only days beyond Luke who had likely been repeating exercises for three years. And at the end of TLJ she had a little training from Luke and has abilities far beyond Luke had after his training from Yoda for a month or more.

Only in potential. Kenobi in AotC derides Anakin for his lack of practice, while Anakin himself also lamented that he wasn't as poweful as he should be.

That's a fundamental difference between Kenobi and Anakin. Kenobi his force potential wasn't that spectacular, but he had great discipline and did a lot of training and practice making him great. But everything was easy for Anakin and thus he didn't practice as much as he should. But after Mustafar, Anakin lost a lot of his force potential (along with a large part of his body -- midichlorians connect us to the Force and they live in living cells...of which Anakin suddenly had a lot less) and now as the armored Vader he had to practice.

 

The lightsaber battle in ESB is done incredibly well, both practically and thematically.

 

Her line when Finn asks if she's flown before was, IIRC, "not really!"

The novelization explains that she's logged countless hours on a flight simulator she found, which makes "I'm a pilot" and "not really" make some sense together. But that's not to the film's credit when it doesn't give us that information but does specifically tell us she hasn't "really" flown before--whatever we're to assume that means. It does more to undermine the audience's belief in that scene than it does to earn it.