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MDG, I think you have things twisted and backwards. No one needed that stupid EU canon because the movie told you the important stuff. Luke says he’s not a bad pilot. We see spacecraft treated as stand-in-automobiles in terms of accessibility. Luke mentions the T-16 when it comes to shooting womprats, with the implication that an X-Wing should be able to hit anything a T-16 can. NOTE: I don’t mean in some extra canon geek way. It’s world building that shows Luke is confident and knowledgeable about shooting a target with a spacecraft. We are given enough information to know Luke and those around him feel confident that he can at least fly an X-Wing, if not excel as a pilot.


You keep harping on the EU as if it was written to close plot holes. You do this as a take-that! against anyone who points out plot holes in the ST. But these are not comparable situations since the EU stuff for the OT was not written to fill plot holes. This was not a plot hole. They were written to fill out role playing sourcebooks and novel series. The ST makes no sense without outside information, whereas the OT made perfect sense without the extraneous info. You are not addressing the actual complaints.

 Lord Damocles wrote:
People are putting more effort into post-hoc writing the show than Filoni did

nah this is just looking at what we're giving and drawing the conclusions from it


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 LunarSol wrote:
The internet tends to amplify negativity. When you were a kid no one was posting a constant feed of “Top 10 Plot Holes in Star Wars” and jumping into every excited conversation with a dissenting opinion.

the thing that baffles me about this is these people think doing this proves they're FANS LOL.

We really need another term for people who are still engaged with a story product long after story product has run out of story.

I just take the good, ignore the bad, I mean I liked the EU, that doesn't mean I thought the crystal star was any good

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:
We really need another term for people who are still engaged with a story product long after story product has run out of story.

Why? "Fan" is an already cromulent word for them. It *IS* short for "fanatic", after all.

 chromedog wrote:

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:
We really need another term for people who are still engaged with a story product long after story product has run out of story.

Why? "Fan" is an already cromulent word for them. It *IS* short for "fanatic", after all.

That’s the joke.gif

I was just responding to someone claiming the people still talking about Star Wars shouldn’t call themselves “fans”.

I suppose it does complicate things when there are only 5 forms of movie product available for consumers anymore.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:


Folk on the Internet were apparently upset that Rey could do things without us knowing a detailed history of Rey. Whilst not appreciating that many of Luke’s exploits were clarified in external media. And yes, that does include the novelisation of the film.

The problem is with execution. Luke and Rey share similarities, but Luke is just characterized way better.

Likewise in Empire Strikes Back? We see Luke use The Force to summon his lightsaber to his hand in the Wampa cave. A feat first shown in that scene.

Yet…..when Rey uses The Force to resist Kylo Ren’s mind probe, the same weirdos at least pretended to be upset that she couldn’t possibly have done that without someone training her, because how else could she possibly just sort of…..figure it out,

ESB takes place years after Luke meets Obi Wan and starts learning about the Force. I can believe that, in that time, he continued to practise and became capable enough to pull a lightsaber out of the snow.

Rey on the other hand goes from not even believing the Force exists to resisting a mind probe from a guy who learned all about space wizardry from Luke himself when he was still just a kid and has clearly been using space magic for years.

See the difference?

This applies to other things that Luke and Rey have in common. Luke going from farm boy to fighter pilot is insane, but again we see him struggle. He nearly crashes his X Wing into the Death Star. He has to get help from his buddies when a TIE Fighter gets on his six.

Rey? Nah, no struggles. This chick who has to scrounge parts for food, with no vehicle of her own, who carries everything she owns on her person, just hops into the Falcon's cockpit and makes a total mockery of the TIE pilots chasing her.

Similar idea for both characters, very different execution. Having a preference for the way Luke was written does not make me a 'weirdo.' I just prefer it when the characters in my media aren't amazing at everything for no reason.

Counterpoints:

-Rey resisting a mind probe is less about showing how strong Rey is and more showing how weak Kylo is. In general, TFA's narrative and dialogue repeatedly makes points about him not being fully trained, being impulsive, struggling to attune to the force, being raw and unfocused, etc. This is somewhat skewed by the opening moments of the movie when he stops a blaster bolt mid-air (oh hey, we've never seen anyone do that before, Kylo is a mary sue!), which gives the impression that he must be pretty powerful - but every other jedi or sith we've seen would've just batted it aside effortlessly with their lightsaber, or in Vaders case quite literally just caught the bolt in his hand. My interpretation of the "force stasis" moment was always that Kylo was too weak to do more than that, he's focusing his energy on holding the bolt in place and doesn't use his powers for anything else while he's holding it, he has to hold it there the entire time and only releases it after everyone is moving on, which speaks to the idea that he wasn't able to redirect it or neutralize it in any other manner except to hold it and release it. In addition, when he freezes the bolt, he also kinda freezes Poe - Poe looks like he is resisting Kylos force ability, and has to be taken into custody by Stormtroopers, whereas we've seen Vader on multiple occasions just pull folks right into his grip from the other end of the room, etc. Kylo appears unable to do this himself judging by Poe's movements.

-Rey is mentioned as having been a pilot as well prior to her flying the Falcon (also, come on - Anakin never flew anything other than a podracer but managed to destroy the droid control ship), she literally refers to herself as a pilot as her and Finn are running towards the quad jumper on Jakku - whether she was lying or not isn't clear, but she also seems to know enough of what she's doing in the cockpit to believe she has flown something before (safe to assume that she's flown the quadjumper before, and later tie-in fiction confirmed that) - Finn refers to her again as a pilot later, and Rey again refers to herself as a pilot when speaking with Han. Even still, she wasn't particularly good at flying the Falcon - she clips and collides with a lot of stuff while flying around in it and quite visibly struggles with the controls, as well as quite obviously getting lucky on several occasions. She also owns a speeder bike or whatever - clearly it must have been manufactured by the same guys that manufactured the Falcon.

chaos0xomega wrote:


-Rey resisting a mind probe is less about showing how strong Rey is and more showing how weak Kylo is.

Assuming this was the intent, that is not a great place to start their rivalry. Having your protagonist struggle against the villain and rise to the challenge is how you get the audience to cheer for your hero. That's just storytelling 101.

In general, TFA's narrative and dialogue repeatedly makes points about him not being fully trained, being impulsive, struggling to attune to the force, being raw and unfocused, etc. This is somewhat skewed by the opening moments of the movie when he stops a blaster bolt mid-air (oh hey, we've never seen anyone do that before, Kylo is a mary sue!)

This doesn't make Kylo a mary sue. Doing something we haven't seen before doesn't suggest that he's amazing at everything, just that he's got a different skillset than we've seen from other evil space wizards.

-Rey is mentioned as having been a pilot as well prior to her flying the Falcon (also, come on - Anakin never flew anything other than a podracer but managed to destroy the droid control ship)

And it's equally stupid in Phantom Menace.

she literally refers to herself as a pilot as her and Finn are running towards the quad jumper on Jakku - whether she was lying or not isn't clear, but she also seems to know enough of what she's doing in the cockpit to believe she has flown something before (safe to assume that she's flown the quadjumper before, and later tie-in fiction confirmed that) - Finn refers to her again as a pilot later, and Rey again refers to herself as a pilot when speaking with Han.

Regardless of what the characters say, the audience is presented with a look into Rey's life that is totally at odds with her actually being a pilot.

Even still, she wasn't particularly good at flying the Falcon - she clips and collides with a lot of stuff while flying around in it and quite visibly struggles with the controls, as well as quite obviously getting lucky on several occasions. She also owns a speeder bike or whatever - clearly it must have been manufactured by the same guys that manufactured the Falcon.

This is borderline insincere. She pulls off some pretty spectacular aerial acrobatics with a ship she's never seen before, threading a needle in some pretty tight quarters at breakneck speed. If Rey's piloting 'wasn't particularly good' then I have to wonder how piss poor First Order pilot training must be.

I think fundamentally issues with Rey are the same as issues with all 3 of the newer films - the films do an abysmal amount of actually telling the audience what's going on; why things are happening; where we are; what the state of play is; who characters are and anything.

There's so much information that clearly went into the background which never made it film-side. I suspect that to the writers it made a lot of sense; but by the time we get to the film we see on the screen so much of that information got cut out and so much happens off-screen (all that time after Return of the Jedi and the start of the film) that the audience gets lost.

The audience has to start filling in a lot of blanks and when that happens some people are good at it and enjoy the film because they enjoy filling in the gaps and others get confused and others utterly hate it. It's also not a "smarts" thing; part of a films whole role is to give enough for the audience to keep up and when the audience has to invent too much the film is generally failing (unless its a very artistic bit of work and that's the whole intention - which is a very different kind of film).



Honestly for me the issue with Rey flying the Falcon is less that she can fly it; its more that its so convenient that Han and Chewy picked it up on tracking and were in the area on that very day; the same day that their entire supporting cast of characters on their alien hunting ship got killed and the same day two of their creditors come looking for them to kill them. To me it felt like such a forced sequence of events. It didn't feel like a natural progression, which is another of my issues with the film. So many things happen that feel convenient to the story rather than evolving from the story happening.




Edit - Luke as a farmboy - I feel its important to note that Luke is clearly more than just a farmboy. He's a farmboy who grew up with aspirations to join the fleets and has clearly trained in flying ships of several different classes even if he's never left his home world. Heck we see him argue with his uncle about wanting to leave the farm and this is clearly not just a spur of the moment thing but a long running friction in the family dynamic. One that Luke is clearly winning on and its pretty clear that he was going to leave the farm soon and was going to become a pilot.
He's most certainly still green and does need help, but he's very far from untrained.

I don't think Kylo was ever actually intended to be the villain. Even after 3 movies, its still not entirely clear to me that he ever really was a villain, so much so as a misguided petulant child allowed to make bad decisions with lethal weapons.

The point of me calling Kylo a mary sue was to illustrate what I perceive as a logic gap. You're cool with him having the ability to stop a blaster bolt mid-air. Its a skill he has. Why aren't you cool with Rey being able to pilot a starfighter?

Regarding Rey being able to fly a starfighter being at odds with the film - you're right. You would not expect her to really be much of a pilot based on what little the film shows you. The tie-in stuff released in the lead-up to the film, as well as the film novelization itself, basically bends over backwards and jumps through hoops to emphasize the fact that she actually did have extensive piloting experience in both simulators (which she evidently found in the wreckage of a star destroyer or something and brought back to her wrecked AT-AT home) as well as in the cockpit of a number of different craft. Seems kind of unlikely and shoehorned in, personally.

Regarding "insincerity" - what? Within seconds of starting up the Falcon she almost crashes it back into the ground (the only reason she doesn't is because the landing gear is still deployed) and she takes out a pair of moisture vaporators/antenna in the process. Then she actually *does* crash it into the ground, giving it a full 90 degree roll to put the cockpit nacelle into the dirt and taking out the "arch" at the edge of town, and then bounces it into the dirt a couple more times before she gets it fully righted and airborne. The next flight sequence doesn't show her doing anything particularly exciting except for what looks like a bit of an immelmann, which is actually a fairly basic flight maneuver - even then, she almost crashes the falcon again and barely manages to right it in time. From there, she almost collides with the FO Ties, who very easily maneuver in on her 6 without any real effort whatseover. From there, they tail her for a pretty extended period and successfully land a number of hits on her. She verbally expresses lack of confidence in her ability on a couple of occasions through this sequence. She puts one side of the falcon back into the dirt while banking into a turn, collides with wreckage while trying to level off from that turn, continues to fail to shake the tie fighters, takes some more hits, bounces off the deck one more time, and then Finn mercifully manages to shoot down one of the TIEs before his wingman hits Finns gun turret and disables it. She continues to fail to shake the remaining TIE fighter, "threads the needle" into the Star Destroyer structure, where she continues to take hits and collide into stuff, makes asudden turn out which again fails to shake the TIE, and then only manages to evade it because she cleverly cut the engines on the Falcon to pitch it into a position where Finns disabled turret can pull a shot off, which he succeeds in taking.

Rey's flying is fancy, but its not particularly good. She had those TIEs on her 6 the entire time and failed to outmaneuver them. It was Finns shooting that really saved the day more than anything else - why isn't he getting hate? He had no training or experience as a ball turret gunner, operating a gun turret with limit and narrow firing arcs using a non-visual targeting system while being tossed around by an inexpert pilot is not easy, yet in 5 minutes he managed to score as many kills as my Grandpa managed as an anti-aircraft gunner in the entirety of World War 2? Come on, Finn is clearly OP.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Overread wrote:
Honestly for me the issue with Rey flying the Falcon is less that she can fly it; its more that its so convenient that Han and Chewy picked it up on tracking and were in the area on that very day; the same day that their entire supporting cast of characters on their alien hunting ship got killed and the same day two of their creditors come looking for them to kill them. To me it felt like such a forced sequence of events. It didn't feel like a natural progression, which is another of my issues with the film. So many things happen that feel convenient to the story rather than evolving from the story happening.

This is a good point. In reality, Star Wars is *filled* with convenient coincidences like this, but the writing in the prequels and originals generally did a pretty good job of making it seem like less of a coincidence.

chaos0xomega wrote:


The point of me calling Kylo a mary sue was to illustrate what I perceive as a logic gap. You're cool with him having the ability to stop a blaster bolt mid-air. Its a skill he has. Why aren't you cool with Rey being able to pilot a starfighter?

Because nothing they show me about Kylo's life is at odds with what he's able to do onscreen. He's clearly not some homeless hermit trudging around a backwater planet doing stuff that makes me wonder how the hell he knows how to do those things. He's with a bunch of stormtroopers, has a lightsaber, is wearing some very Vader-inspired garb - clearly he's got some sort of imperial association. It doesn't stand out as instantly ridiculous that he can do any of the things he does.

Regarding Rey being able to fly a starfighter being at odds with the film - you're right. You would not expect her to really be much of a pilot based on what little the film shows you. The tie-in stuff released in the lead-up to the film, as well as the film novelization itself, basically bends over backwards and jumps through hoops to emphasize the fact that she actually did have extensive piloting experience in both simulators (which she evidently found in the wreckage of a star destroyer or something and brought back to her wrecked AT-AT home) as well as in the cockpit of a number of different craft. Seems kind of unlikely and shoehorned in, personally.

On this we're fully agreed. It does seem unlikely and shoehorned in.

Regarding "insincerity" - what? Within seconds of starting up the Falcon she almost crashes it back into the ground... *snip*

I'm just gonna have to straight up agree to disagree with you on this. Rey might stumble for the first like... five seconds of this chase scene, but everything after that it might as well be Han flying the Falcon.

Rey's flying is fancy, but its not particularly good. She had those TIEs on her 6 the entire time and failed to outmaneuver them. It was Finns shooting that really saved the day more than anything else - why isn't he getting hate? He had no training or experience as a ball turret gunner, operating a gun turret with limit and narrow firing arcs using a non-visual targeting system while being tossed around by an inexpert pilot is not easy, yet in 5 minutes he managed to score as many kills as my Grandpa managed as an anti-aircraft gunner in the entirety of World War 2? Come on, Finn is clearly OP.

Finn has been a stormtrooper for years. I think pretty much his entire life if I recall. It isn't silly to me that he can hop into the gunner seat and press a trigger.

This is a good point. In reality, Star Wars is *filled* with convenient coincidences like this, but the writing in the prequels and originals generally did a pretty good job of making it seem like less of a coincidence.

Again, fully agreed here. Stories often have some things that are convenient for the plot and the characters, but Star Wars - especially under Disney's tenure these last eight years - takes it way too far.

Being an infantryman and being what is more or less an aerial/ball turret gunner are entirely different skills. Aiming accurately from a platform that is maneuvering aggressively in 3 dimensions against other targets also maneuvering aggressively in 3 dimensions, and doing so when you can't directly aim the gun yourself but instead have to rely on a sensor/remote viewing system to orient yourself to their motion and aim, requires a very different skillset from shouldering a rifle and aiming down the sights as you squeeze the trigger.

Besides, whats that old joke about stormtroopers not being very precise shooters?

It's just that, a joke.


Though I'll note that at least in Canada, a lot of our helo's door gunners are infantrymen to begin with. So having Finn trained as a gunner on some turret is not too far fetched.

@Chaos0xomega: My single favourite section of the sequel trilogy is the throne room fight in TLJ with Kylo and Rey working together and the best bit of that is after the fight when Kylo is just “you know what, feth the Sith. And feth the Jedi. They’ve brought us nothing but trouble, let’s go do our own thing”. It’s one of the most honest, believable, character driven moments in the entire franchise, and it really sets Kylo up to be an interesting antagonist, rather than a villain, because Rey essentially feels the same way, but has a massively different perspective on what they should do.

There’s hints of it again towards the end of Rise (and probably earlier in TFA, now that I think about it), but the rest of the trilogy is such a poorly executed mess that it gets lost in the noise. If they’d made that the core arc of the entire trilogy, they could have had a really interesting emotional tension driving the whole thing (akin to Luke and his relationship with his father)

Finn is trained pretty much from birth to be a warrior. When you consider how readily children learn things, spending all his formative years focused purely on combat training would mean that there'd be ample time for him to be trained in quite a wide variety of disciplines.

If we accept that the First Order is on the small side then having cross trained warriors would make even more sense. That way their armed forces can adapt to different roles and tasks with a decent to high level of skill rather than having infantry that only know one very specific role and which cannot adapt.

He's basically elite trained on multiple methods of battle.



My problem with him is him turning on his first deployment. We should have seen a montage of him witnessing many combats, many encounters; multiple fights and being involved in them before he broke.

Or a montage of him rebelling against his training whilst a youth. Again something to suggest a reason for him breaking on the battlefield when his entire life was training for the battlefield.




Again I suspect there WAS that content in the storyboard/structure behind the scenes. I suspect there's quite a bit of it; however like many aspects it never makes it into the film that we see.

 Ahtman wrote:
Coming out of hyperspace into an Imperial minefield gave me strong X-Wing on the PC flashbacks.

Ha, talk to me when you have cleared a minefield in an unshielded Tie!


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
And it’s like suggesting that someone who’s not bad at flying a Cessna can therefore pilot an F16 with identical aplomb. Which is silly.

Well to be fair he does just crash it into the alien ship.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Folk on the Internet were apparently upset that Rey could do things without us knowing a detailed history of Rey. Whilst not appreciating that many of Luke’s exploits were clarified in external media. And yes, that does include the novelisation of the film.

Likewise in Empire Strikes Back? We see Luke use The Force to summon his lightsaber to his hand in the Wampa cave. A feat first shown in that scene.

Yet…..when Rey uses The Force to resist Kylo Ren’s mind probe, the same weirdos at least pretended to be upset that she couldn’t possibly have done that without someone training her, because how else could she possibly just sort of…..figure it out,

Luke got the occasional training montage. There was enough done to convince the audience he was learning. Rey's character skips all that, or at least if she didn't it made little impression on the audience.

All we see of Luke’s training is against the Remote. At no point in the film does he see any use of the Force beyond Ben doing the mind trick, and turning into rags when Vader strikes him down.

Ben appearing to him on Hoth? That’s the earliest canonical appearance of an actual Force Ghost. Ben does say “use the force” over Yavin, but doesn’t exactly say what that means.

Rey has Ren probe her mind. In resisting, she finds that link goes both ways. This is what catches Ren off guard. Her first attempt to mind trick a Storm Trooper takes a couple of goes to get it right.

Her piloting skills are no better or worse explained or previously demonstrated than Luke’s. When she and Finn are looking for a ship to get away in? Finn says “we’ll need a pilot”, to which Rey simply responds “we’ve got one”.

We later find she’s very familiar with the Falcon, as she knows what Plutt did to it, why it was a stupid modification, and how to bypass it.

Remember though, this isn’t “therefore Rey am spectacular character and anyone who not think that am the wrung”. Rather, this is an attempt to show that Rey was subjected to a level of scrutiny not applied to Luke or other characters.

 creeping-deth87 wrote:
Rey? Nah, no struggles. This chick who has to scrounge parts for food, with no vehicle of her own, who carries everything she owns on her person, just hops into the Falcon's cockpit and makes a total mockery of the TIE pilots chasing her.

But that seems to fit the modern SW ethos of anyone who wants to fight the Empire can, its easy. You just have to believe!

As opposed to the original films that (ewoks aside) that show a difficult struggle turned around by individual acts.
Can't find this great strategy article about 'catastrophic success' where it talks about the rebellion winning the war but lacking the manpower and organisation as an aerospace centric force to stop things falling apart afterwards (it was drawing on lessons from Iraq et al). Very amusing sadly though my search fu has failed. But i guess Disney doesn't like the messy side of such things, which is a shame because they keep solving the problem the heroes are ostensibly fighting against.



Automatically Appended Next Post:
I did though find this.
https://theconversation.com/how-did-the-rebels-beat-the-empire-in-star-wars-the-answer-is-closer-to-home-than-you-think-128271

 creeping-deth87 wrote:

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:


Folk on the Internet were apparently upset that Rey could do things without us knowing a detailed history of Rey. Whilst not appreciating that many of Luke’s exploits were clarified in external media. And yes, that does include the novelisation of the film.

The problem is with execution. Luke and Rey share similarities, but Luke is just characterized way better.

Likewise in Empire Strikes Back? We see Luke use The Force to summon his lightsaber to his hand in the Wampa cave. A feat first shown in that scene.

Yet…..when Rey uses The Force to resist Kylo Ren’s mind probe, the same weirdos at least pretended to be upset that she couldn’t possibly have done that without someone training her, because how else could she possibly just sort of…..figure it out,

ESB takes place years after Luke meets Obi Wan and starts learning about the Force. I can believe that, in that time, he continued to practise and became capable enough to pull a lightsaber out of the snow.

Rey on the other hand goes from not even believing the Force exists to resisting a mind probe from a guy who learned all about space wizardry from Luke himself when he was still just a kid and has clearly been using space magic for years.

See the difference?

This applies to other things that Luke and Rey have in common. Luke going from farm boy to fighter pilot is insane, but again we see him struggle. He nearly crashes his X Wing into the Death Star. He has to get help from his buddies when a TIE Fighter gets on his six.

Rey? Nah, no struggles. This chick who has to scrounge parts for food, with no vehicle of her own, who carries everything she owns on her person, just hops into the Falcon's cockpit and makes a total mockery of the TIE pilots chasing her.

Similar idea for both characters, very different execution. Having a preference for the way Luke was written does not make me a 'weirdo.' I just prefer it when the characters in my media aren't amazing at everything for no reason.

Okay. Luke just found out about the force. Obi starts teaching him while they are on the Falcon flying to Alderan. He tries and fails to deflect the little training droid shooting him with his visor down. They are on the ship for like... a week. After only a single week of training with Obi Wan Luke was able to use the force, without struggle, to make the shot that destroyed the Deathstar without any targeting computer. Something he has never seen the force do, or been told the force was capable of.

Remember, Rey was raised on stories about the force and the great Jedi Luke Skywalker. Luke was raised in complete ignorance of the force. He knows the word Jedi, but doesn't actually know anything about what it actually means or anything about their "religion".

 Lance845 wrote:


Okay. Luke just found out about the force. Obi starts teaching him while they are on the Falcon flying to Alderan. He tries and fails to deflect the little training droid shooting him with his visor down. They are on the ship for like... a week. After only a single week of training with Obi Wan Luke was able to use the force, without struggle, to make the shot that destroyed the Deathstar without any targeting computer. Something he has never seen the force do, or been told the force was capable of.

Remember, Rey was raised on stories about the force and the great Jedi Luke Skywalker. Luke was raised in complete ignorance of the force. He knows the word Jedi, but doesn't actually know anything about what it actually means or anything about their "religion".

Also, we see that kid at the end of The Last Jedi, who is able to use the Force to pull a broom to him, who is clearly untrained in the Force but is able to use that specific power that Luke used in ESB.

Qui-Gon Jinn speculates that part of young anakin's piloting skill is an instinctive precognition ability, hes literally seeing thing before they happen.

Clearly, the force is not limited to use only by trained peoples. The Jedi and Sith orders are ways to channel and improve peoples ability, and pretty good at it, but not the sole manner in which someone can learn.

I'm sure in the Empire Strikes back we have Yoda saying that the Force acts through people. That its not always about commanding it, but letting it flow through you and work with you.

Also in the Clone Wars its important to note that the Jedi had been having a waning period in force power. Potentially that means fewer and fewer "native talent" people would be being discovered. So Anakin is super special at that time.

Meanwhile events of the main series of films should have left a balance in the Force which would allow more native instinct to arise within the galactic population.

 Overread wrote:
My issue is the state of everyone else. All the character who's back history we know from the first 3 films have changed, sometimes drastically.

I really adore 7, but Han and Leia explaining the other person's past directly to them is hilariously clunky and pretty much the epitome of this problem.

 Overread wrote:
I think fundamentally issues with Rey are the same as issues with all 3 of the newer films - the films do an abysmal amount of actually telling the audience what's going on; why things are happening; where we are; what the state of play is; who characters are and anything.

This is not a Star Wars problem, this is a modern movies problem.

It is amazing to me how much information older movies can get across in a single sentence, quick scene, or even the framing of a shot. Yet, modern movies seem to struggle with this.

It must be something to do with the modern process of movie-making as opposed to the way they did it in the 40s-80s. Perhaps it is the rise of writer's rooms and not having writer's on set anymore?

 Jadenim wrote:
@Chaos0xomega: My single favourite section of the sequel trilogy is the throne room fight in TLJ with Kylo and Rey working together and the best bit of that is after the fight when Kylo is just “you know what, feth the Sith. And feth the Jedi. They’ve brought us nothing but trouble, let’s go do our own thing”. It’s one of the most honest, believable, character driven moments in the entire franchise, and it really sets Kylo up to be an interesting antagonist, rather than a villain, because Rey essentially feels the same way, but has a massively different perspective on what they should do.

There’s hints of it again towards the end of Rise (and probably earlier in TFA, now that I think about it), but the rest of the trilogy is such a poorly executed mess that it gets lost in the noise. If they’d made that the core arc of the entire trilogy, they could have had a really interesting emotional tension driving the whole thing (akin to Luke and his relationship with his father)

Agreed.

The_Real_Chris wrote:

 creeping-deth87 wrote:
Rey? Nah, no struggles. This chick who has to scrounge parts for food, with no vehicle of her own, who carries everything she owns on her person, just hops into the Falcon's cockpit and makes a total mockery of the TIE pilots chasing her.

But that seems to fit the modern SW ethos of anyone who wants to fight the Empire can, its easy. You just have to believe!
As opposed to the original films that (ewoks aside) that show a difficult struggle turned around by individual acts.
Can't find this great strategy article about 'catastrophic success' where it talks about the rebellion winning the war but lacking the manpower and organisation as an aerospace centric force to stop things falling apart afterwards (it was drawing on lessons from Iraq et al). Very amusing sadly though my search fu has failed. But i guess Disney doesn't like the messy side of such things, which is a shame because they keep solving the problem the heroes are ostensibly fighting against.

Automatically Appended Next Post:
I did though find this.
https://theconversation.com/how-did-the-rebels-beat-the-empire-in-star-wars-the-answer-is-closer-to-home-than-you-think-128271

Was it related to Strategy Strikes Back at all? https://www.amazon.com/Strategy-Strikes-Back-Explains-Military/dp/1640120335

But yeah, the idea that the Rebellion won the war but lost the peace because they were effective guerillas but not necessarily effective administrators is not a particularly new concept. The flip side though is that (at least insofar as the old EU is concerned, but also to an extent the new EU with Mon Mothma, etc.) the Rebellion had the support of many veteran politicians and planetary governors/executives/sovereigns, etc. so the idea that they did not have the experience or knowledge base to administer and govern isn't a particularly well founded one within the context of the lore. They may not have necessarily had the resources or the infrastructure to support a galaxy scale government in place though, even with that knowledge and experience, as the Old Republic was a somewhat loose and open structure and itself lacked much of the resources and infrastructure to hold the galaxy together once a push for secession arose, and was on the back foot through much of the war despite the Confederacy being a much smaller power, whereas the Empire was reliant on an overwhelming and crushing bureaucracy and military power to hold itself together, which the Rebellion/New Republic did not have or want.

 Easy E wrote:

 Overread wrote:
I think fundamentally issues with Rey are the same as issues with all 3 of the newer films - the films do an abysmal amount of actually telling the audience what's going on; why things are happening; where we are; what the state of play is; who characters are and anything.

This is not a Star Wars problem, this is a modern movies problem.

It is amazing to me how much information older movies can get across in a single sentence, quick scene, or even the framing of a shot. Yet, modern movies seem to struggle with this.

It must be something to do with the modern process of movie-making as opposed to the way they did it in the 40s-80s. Perhaps it is the rise of writer's rooms and not having writer's on set anymore?

I very very much do agree that its a modern movie problem. Starwars highlights it a lot because its part of a huge running saga so we come with a LOT of preloaded info and the gap and lack of info is very striking. But I do agree there are a lot of films these days which do an abysmal job of actually telling their stories and where movie pacing is just terrible. Many superhero films often feel like they start of slow and good and then rush like a madman at the end and cover vast amounts of time and events with hardly a moment for any of them

BrianDavion wrote:

 LunarSol wrote:
The internet tends to amplify negativity. When you were a kid no one was posting a constant feed of “Top 10 Plot Holes in Star Wars” and jumping into every excited conversation with a dissenting opinion.

the thing that baffles me about this is these people think doing this proves they're FANS LOL.

There's some cool psychology around this and the need to "prove" empirical quality with the same kind of objective measurement used for scientific reasoning.

You’re right that film quality is entirely subjective with no possibility for quality comparison. No one could ever argue persuasively that the OT is a better made set of movies than the ST just like no one can argue Star Wars is a better film than The Room. Totally impossible.

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:
You’re right that film quality is entirely subjective with no possibility for quality comparison. No one could ever argue persuasively that the OT is a better made set of movies than the ST just like no one can argue Star Wars is a better film than The Room. Totally impossible.

So what makes the Room bad? Is it the plot holes per second? Perhaps the Dutch angles per scene? That's a pretty wild misinterpretation of what I was talking about.

What you were posting was a pretty big misrepresentation of other people’s criticisms. Your response now sounds bizarrely off, like you don’t actually understand why people find bad movies bad.