“No it didn’t. She went through a lot more trials and tribulations than Luke did before he blew up the Death Star. She was homeless, abandoned and starving. Luke had a home, parental figures and grub. Rey didn’t go to Jedi anything, that’s just a stupid complaint the whiners made up. She’s shown no more Force ability than Luke did in the first movie.”
Yeah, correct me if I’m mistaken, but I don’t recall Luke dueling and effortlessly handing Vader his butt in their first encounter, or him managing to use a Jedi Mind Trick on a Stormtrooper despite not even knowing about the ability in A New Hope, both of which are what REY demonstrated in The Force Awakens.
Also, Luke at least had been shown training with the Force beforehand under Obi-Wan’s guidance (remember the time he got shot by that remote on the way to Alderaan?), and even his skills with flying an X-Wing was at least justified fairly early on by his being able to fly a Skyhopper in incidental dialogue, while with Rey, other than flying that cart, she demonstrated absolutely NO prior knowledge of flying craft at all (and certainly not flying something like The Millennium Falcon), and made clear that she never even HEARD of the Force yet STILL managed to pull off those stunts.
I will give you one thing, though: She most certainly had a lot more tribulations than even Anakin Skywalker, let alone Luke. And if I must be honest, I personally found her plight in the beginning of the film to be a LOT more sympathetic than Belle from Disney’s Beauty and the Beast. I won’t say she had more trials, though. Trials would imply actual training, which Luke clearly had her beat in.
“The Marty Ste/ Mary Sue wish fulfillment in the first movie is obvious for anybody that bothers to pay attention to George’s life up to making that movie. Inconsistency in the next movie doesn’t change the simple fact that all the main hero characters were wish fulfillment for George starting with his stand-in character that shares his name.”
I’ll give you the bit about Luke sharing Lucas’s name. However, he still wasn’t a marty stu (an actual marty stu in his position would have OHKOed the Sand People or actually passed on the first try that whole remote thing rather than being shot in the leg or outright cream Vader in a fight. Even in the original film, he definitely struggled. Heck, Luke wasn’t even the one to beat Vader, Han did if anyone, and even there, Vader only lost because his surviving wingman panicked and accidentally knocked him out of the trench).
“ALL movies are money grabs. You don’t think Disney paid 4 billion dollars for the franchise just for fun do you.”
Technically, ANYTHING ever made is a cash grab under the definition that money is a factor into things being made. But I’m pretty sure that wasn’t what the posters meant by a “cash grab” (and Lucas made the films specifically to push Vietcong and left-wing propaganda, which if you ask me is FAR worse than just making it for money’s sake).
“It is actually a triumph to be able to get decent female characters on the screen again. A weird cycle happened with SF in the 2000s, we went from getting solid female characters all over the genre (Ripley, Sarah Connor, Buffy) to basically none. Time to get them back. And Rey’s no worse written than any other SW character.”
Ah, actually, she was, largely because unlike Luke in even the first Star Wars movie, she literally had NOTHING shown or even mentioned about her superb feats at all. Maybe if they had incidental dialogue mentioning she had flown the Millennium Falcon a few times before to justify her flying abilities, or mentioned she had some sense of her having powers due to some incidents but couldn’t explain them, I could buy her going all superpowered.
And this is speaking as someone who agrees that the way women are depicted as supermen in an obvious attempt at pandering to feminists was just stupid (like Alice from Resident Evil, for example). I do have little problem with Honoka from Dead or Alive 5 Last Round, though (and the problems I do have with the character don’t even have anything to do with her skills so much as her loving onsens), and in fact, I actually could make sense of her being as good as she is (since it’s heavily implied that she often trained in secret so she could satisfy her desire to fight and also test out her powers, and that she also trained via watching and matching various martial arts actions to form her admittedly self-taught Honoka Fu moves).
“And now we see indeed you are just the Comicbook Guy. Worst whiner ever. If you don’t like SW stop watching the movies, save yourself and the people around you from your BS.”
I know you’re talking to that other person, but I felt I must mention this: just because I have some pretty justified criticisms of the films right now doesn’t mean I dislike Star Wars. Ultimately, I grew up on Star Wars, so I don’t have the heart to get away from it, and I do retain some fondness for the franchise. Even when I learned that it was meant to push Vietcong propaganda, I didn’t leave the franchise, instead I ended up rooting for the Empire who was supposed to be America if Lucas is to be believed (and bear in mind, I don’t root for villains as a rule, THAT’S how bad Lucas’s revelation shook me). May not like it that I have to root for villains in that case, but it’s either that or continuing to root for Rebels after learning they were in fact a bunch of communist insurgents.
Luke had been training for hours when he guided that bomb down the shoot. Remember what the Force really is: wish fulfillment. People strong in the Force can make ANYTHING they want happen. Most of Force training consists of 2 things: learning you can do anything you want, and learning to not do anything you want (at least on the Jedi side). And Luke’s piloting skills are NOT justified. He winds up the one of the best pilots in the Death Star assault even though he’s never been in an X-Wing before.
Rey had discussed flying previously also, so if Luke’s skill was justified so was hers. And it’s not like she was really that good, she bounced the Falcon off a lot of stuff. And she had heard of the Force before, Luke hadn’t. And Rey wasn’t good in the fight either. She “won” that because Kylo Ren was injured, and he was fighting to subdue her with big long slow attacks that are specifically designed to be blockable.
Sorry but Luke IS a Marty Stu, he is a complete stand-in for Lucas, they have the same thumbnail bio. Losing to the Sand Person doesn’t change that, nor does Han taking care of Vader. Those were all necessary step for him to form the “party”, that’s just part of movie story telling where every loss is necessary for the win. If the Sand Person doesn’t pop him he doesn’t meet Obi Wan, Han popping Vader is really about Han fully joining the group that Luke brought him into.
There was plenty of incidental dialog setting up everything. We knew she knew how to fly stuff (it is the SW universe EVERYBODY knows how to fly stuff, it’s like driving a car in a modern placed movie), she knew the Falcon was a piece of junk, and she didn’t really fly it very well.
People make too much out of the Viet Cong thing. Here’s the punchline on that: if that was his message he did a lousy job of it because literally NOBODY sees it until they see him explaining it. One of the interesting things about SW is it’s a very “blank” universe, you can see in it what you want to see. Lucas can look at the Rebellion and see the Viet Cong, liberals can look at the Rebellion and see diversity made manifest, conservatives can look at the Rebellion and see a well armed militia. If you want to see a Mary Sue being all feminist you can. What I see are fun B movies with an A budget, they’re a good ride, but don’t look at them too closely because there’s some serious cracks in that makeup.
And I just don’t understand people who go to movies just to not like them, especially not those who dislike them for hours at a time. I don’t like King Kong, never interested me, saw a couple of the movies when I was young because I was “supposed to” (you know education of the nerd and all) but I didn’t enjoy them. So when Skull Island got announced I knew I wouldn’t see it, and I didn’t. Was it a good movie? Don’t know, don’t care, don’t like Kong, didn’t see it. A lot of the people whining about SW hate it way more than I dislike Kong, and I shake my head at why they even went. Some people just don’t seem to feel whole if they ain’t bitching.