Quote Originally Posted by Vivi22 View Post
Quote Originally Posted by NeoCracker View Post
Having watched it, Ray is about the only thing seriously dragging the movie down for me.

Everyone immediately loves her, she instantly excels at any task put in front of her regardless of how believable it is (Everything she did on the Falcon, immediately learning how to both defend her mind AND in turn read the mind of Kylo Ren, having never even seen it done before she was able to pull off a Jedi Mind trick on the storm trooper, both of these done without any kind of training, and after Kylo Ren is clearly beating her in their duel she's all 'hey I can just use the force' and proceeds to immediately kick his ass badly. I know he'd already been shot by Chewie and cut by Finn, but that fight was still so one sided up until 'lol force' that it still felt ridiculous.) And among all these things, there seems to be no flaws. You get one brief moment where she has a hard time accepting her past after grabbing the light saber, but that's pretty much it, and it's not really a flaw its an entirely believable reaction to what happens, yet is never touched on again.) The actress was great, but the character itself was just terribly boring.
Im not seeing how any of that is very different from Luke. In episode IV he learns about the force and a matter of hours later he is deflecting blaster bolts literally blindfolded. While escaping from the death star he fights off (supposedly) highly trained soldiers with ease. At the end of the movie he's expertly flying an X-Wing, a ship he's never even seen until that day, and manages to nail a small target with a weapon he's never used by using the force instead of a targeting computer.

And keep in mind, he's basically had no training either. And by the time he reached empire he still has fairly little training (a short time with Yoda compared to a lifetime of training) and holds his own against Darth Vader.

So I'm not really sure where people get this idea that a character being a natural with the force is a deal breaker. It's literally the premise of the main characters of the last two trilogies.
Luke is under the guidance of Ben since the first got together. They weren't together for 'hours', they were together for a prolonged stretch of time. Do you really think that off screen Obi-wan, the Mentor, did absolutely no Mentoring? Cause that would just be silly.

Luke had some time to actually train his abilities under Obi-Wan before we got to see him put his skills into action. Rey experienced a guy doing one thing to her once, resisted it, copied it nearly perfectly, picked up an entirely different trick (The Jedi Mind trick), and then picked up on how to use it in what was only the span of a few hours. This is hardly comparable to Luke.

Furthermore, it's that paired with all of those other things that bothers me. It's an absurd level of natural ability to use the force compared to anything else we have seen in the original Trilogy, an extremely high skill with mechanics (again, look at all she managed to pull with the Falcon), She can understand a large variety of languages, she's a strong fighter, everyone loves her immediately, and all of this paired with pretty much no flaws.

The only flaw I've heard pointed out is she is a bit hot headed, but at what point has this ever even come close to causing a problem? Hell, her 'mistake' of letting out the beasts wasn't really a hindrance, it saved their asses.

Also, Luke had been established as an good Pilot by that point. I can agree it's a bit strange that is a bit silly, but it doesn't really compare with Rey's accomplishments, not even close.

That first Star Wars Movie takes place over a rather prolonged period of time, where as The Force Awakened takes place over the course of a few days.