Star Wars: Episode VIII (The Last Jedi) - SPOILERS POSSIBLE*

Rey's origins are important, because she's the main protagonist, and both episode 7 and 8 are based around her and how special she is. She's so powerful, she have visions and hear voices guiding her, and of all people she was chosen to meet Luke. All this must be explained, and "she's just nobody, a random girl" is not a satisfactory explanation. The idea that the force is everywhere and random people can master it is not original and new, but the premise that the average Joe can be so powerful and capable without any background, education and training doesn't work in that Galaxy. It doesn't make sense and it doesn't hold any valid message.

 

She's special because she's a very powerful Force sensitive. It appears she came from nothing - just like Anakin.

What was Anakin, then?

Didn't baby Anakin blow up a battlecruiser or something his first time behind the wheel of a fighter? Oh yeah, he did!



So I'd say a 20-something year old with over a decade's experience living on her own on a pretty rough planet could certainly pick up Force tricks quickly once exposed to them. I mean, Luke certainly did - in his first battle he blew up the Death Star...

 

The Jedi weren’t even supposed to have families, so how could they pass their powers down from generation to generation? The only reason Anakin had children and a grandson to pass his abilities on to is that he married in secret.

 

The Anakin's extraordinary force gift was explained, like it or not, by the fact that he had just mother, and the rest was done by the midi-something. This can be a lousy explanation, but at least it is firm and clear. Also, in order to be capable to use the force, he needed many years of training. As for his pilot skills - since he was a small kid he mastered race speeders, so he had an experience with this kind of things.
As for Luke being such a good pilot - he prepared himself to attend the military flight academy, so obviously he was trained to some extent. Also, during the dead star battle, he was guided by Obi One spirit.
And again, the fact that there are some plot holes or shortcomings in the OT and the prequels is not a valid reason this to become a trend and to become main feature in the new episodes.

 

Uh, whatever. Those aren't even "plot holes". They may be contrivances, but TLJ is perfectly consistent with the entire rest of the Star Wars universe in using them - including with The Force Awakens, where minutes after Kylo attempts to mind control Ren, she deploys the exact same technique on a Stormtrooper.

And as others have pointed out, since the Jedi were supposed to be celibate, none of them would have been the product of some "special" breeding, either.

If it were really that easy to spot Force sensitives - just follow the bloodlines - nobody would have been surprised by Palpatine or any of the other Sith.

"Hey, the Force is really strong in this guy's family. We maybe should be on the lookout for Sith Lords from that family..."

 

I'm not saying that someone definitely must have a bloodline in order to master the force to one degree or another. There are many indications in the previous episodes that many humans/aliens of all possible "breeds" are capable to learn and use the force - some are more talented, some are better trained, etc. But there must be some better and more clever explanation about Rey's powers. Why she is so force sensitive and so good in everything without any training or considerable background? Why after the resistance finally located Luke, and for them this was of such a great importance, they sent this nobody girl to check what happened with him, alone, accompanied only by Chewy as a pet? Only because perhaps Leia felt that Rey is force sensitive? This is not enough for such a important mission - they should have sent at least few people that knew Luke well, not just a random girl alone. So the fans rightfully expected that there's some big and important mystery about Rey, and that she's somehow connected with some of the original main characters.

But of course this is just one of the problems with TLJ. This movie doesn't have a structure, Let make brief resume of how the story goes:

The beginning of TLJ is inexcusably amateurish, because even though the movie starts exactly where the previous one ended, we still have this opening crawl to tell us what happened between the episodes (and of course, they tell us nothing - they serve just as some yellow decoration). And, it is not even a start of a new movie, just uninterrupted continuation of the previous one, as seen in traditional soap opera TV shows.

The 2+ hours between the beginning and the end offer stunning visuals, but without main well written and developed story/plot (instead, we have some fabricated and useless filler subplot, in order to have some action), and without any satisfactory main character’s development, or revealing at least some of the many mysteries that started in TFA.

The climax of TLJ was when Luke made this giant force-consuming effort, that (possibly) cost him his life - to project himself on the salt planet, allegedly to save the resistance (they waited and hoped for him to save them for two full episodes). And what he did? He just walked out in front of all battle machines, and they all stopped, firing at him together (instead of leaving just few to deal with him and the rest to proceed as planned, but wait – the First Order are idiots, right?). So Luke managed to give few minutes more to the resistance to evacuate, and Rey lifted those rocks (or was she or Luke’s force doing it? We’ll never know). So the whole climax and Luke’s “invaluable” help is a joke – is that what the good guys really hoped and expected from him – to give them few minutes more in order their remnants to escape the rabbit hole?

TFA in comparison (well, it wasn’t highly original, but served nicely as a reboot of the story) have tight, well-made structure – in the beginning we are presented with the main characters and the general situation, then we have a story/plot going with some new mysteries and questions raised (none of them really developed or answered in TLJ), we also have some nice nostalgic references, and at the end we have two perfectly valid climaxes.

 

No structure you say...
You've got a pretty flimsy understanding of structure I've gotta say, all you've done is go on a nit picky rant about some moments you didn't like for whatever reason. The movie is very structured, all the characters have their little story arc and the movie plays itself as you might expect.

 

You have said this a few times but it's nonsense. Yes, the scene with Rey and Luke does continue but there are two time lines at the start of the film - clearly there is a gap in time with the other storyline as at the end of the first film they cheer Rey off and at the start of this they are in the middle of a big space battle. So it's perfectly normal to explain what happened in between.

Just to repeat as you seemed to have missed this - at the start of TLJ Rey's story continues on from TFA but we have jumped time for the rest of the people on the rebel base.

 

My real problem with TLJ, is that a lot of what is happening on screen doesn't make any sense.
The core of the film is this long chase and for 2 hours i wondered why the Empire, i mean 1st order 's fleet didn't send ships ahead and around the Rebels, i mean Resistance.
Why? Because. Ok...
The first scene of the movie is The Resistance fleet taking down the biggest ship of the 1st Order. Didn't it have a shield like the Mon Calamari ship? Why? Because.
Leia is jettisoned in space but stays a few meters away from the ship though it's going full sublight speed. Why? Because.
Holdo doesn't share her plans with her crew even when there is a mutiny. Why? Because.
And so on...

 

Correct me if I'm wrong, but as far as I remember the resistance started their evacuation exactly at the same time when Rey headed to Luke's planet by the Falcon, at the end of TFA, so both story lines are time-aligned...unless I'm missing something. As I understand it, the First order ships just arrived during this same evacuation.

 

I'm correcting you!

At the end of TFA the First Order are all over the place, the base has just blown up and Snook tells Hux to bring the injured Kylo Ren to him. So before TLJ starts then, logically, the First Order have regrouped, Kylo has had some kind of medical treatment (how long did that take, weeks?) and then they have launched their search for the Rebel base, found them and then organised and attack. At the end of TFA the rebels are not evacuating, they are celebrating. Also Finn has had some medical attention that has taken some time as well between films.

How long is that gap then? I would think it must be at least a few weeks, maybe more. So although the Rey sequence is continuous the rest is not.

A good way to think of it is that Rey spent some weeks with Luke on the Island and so the other events happen more towards her final days on the island.

 

Or her journey to Ahch-to was A LOT longer than TFA conveyed.

 

I don't have a clue what the guy from the video is talking about, but the graph reminds me of the Paul McCartney's concept about Magical Mystery Tours movie...

 

Ok, I'm honestly trying to figure out...so TLJ started with the space interaction between resistance and first order, and this scene was actually (weeks, months) ahead of time compared to the next scene, where Rey is giving the light saber to Luke?

 

I don't think in either TFA or TLJ we are given enough information to map out an accurate time line or say when the two stories meet at the same time. I think the film makers might have got it wrong as well. The only thing that links the two story lines is Rey and Kylo's force connections, and time wise that seems to happen a lot further in Kylo's story than it does Rey's.

So it is guess work but I think the only thing that is certain is that, leaving aside Rey, there has to be a significant time gap between films to allow Kylo to heal, some more training from Snook, the First Order to regroup and launch their attack.

 

I'm not sure I follow. Are you suggesting that the entire Rey storyline is not happening concurrently with the rest of the story in TLJ? My impression was that the only area of overlap with TFA was the evacuation o D'Qar and Rey's journey to Ahch-to. When Finn asks Poe where Rey is and we cut to her offering Luke the lightsaber, only now are we picking up from the ending of TFA. Time compression is evident during her journey, but presumably it's long enough for the First Order to reorganize and launch their counter-strike.

We need one of those split-screen videos like people were creating for the Twin Peaks finale!

 

In the first part of the film I don't think we are watching events occur at the same time in both plot lines. She takes off and finds Luke, so if we allow a couple of days for that then she gets there a long time before the First Order have regrouped, Ren has healed etc.

Unless she stayed on the rebel base for a month before flying off to find Luke, but then why would she do that? And if she was there a month she would have met Poe loads of times so he wouldn't be introducing himself at the end of TLJ.

Honestly I don't think they worked out the timelines right so if you are forced to work it out you can't. It doesn't matter watching the film but it doesn't really make sense.

 

Yes, as you say, we can only guess, but (let me do some guess work myself), it's also possible that TLJ space action took place immediately after the end of TFA - the first order forces were already boarded on their space ships (otherwise they wouldn't survive), so they could immediately "strike back"; Kylo's injuries weren't so damaging (only the big scar on his face is something evident, and in the scene where he meet Snoke he have this sticker on his (perhaps still fresh) wound, so it's not completely impossible that this meeting took place shortly after the Kylo - Rey battle, and maybe the Snoke's speech was part of the so called additional training...as for Finn - he could wake up at any time - minutes or years after he was hibernated...well, I'm just trying to make some sense..

 

There are a number of unknown variables-- the amount of time Rey stayed on D'Qar before leaving for Ahch-to, the duration of her trip there, the amount of time Kylo would need to heal from his wounds (the black facial bandage and the high-waisted pants suggest he's still not fully healed), the amount of time if any it would take for the First Order fleet to regroup and travel to D'Qar.

There's opportunity for a novel or comic series to smooth some of this out.

EDIT: I think delmonaco and I are on the same wavelength....

 

Uh its non of them - its just a film technique and the writers thought it would be cool to carry on the scene from the point it ended (wouldnt be suprised if they actually shot it all at the same time anywyay)

The lazy point here is that the writers dont actually care about timelines for these films in that much detail because the whole concept has now just become a "release something from our franchise every year - make it up as you go along - make sure it has a cpl of pivotal moments - put bums on seats (when the last part stops happening then it will stop)

 

Regarding "making it up as they go along," here's an article from November 2015, linked in the first post on page 1 of this very thread (bold emphasis mine):

Seeing as Rian requested that JJ include some story elements in TFA to set up TLJ, I doubt very much that his more controversial choices were made without JJ's knowledge as part of the development process for IX. It also wouldn't surprise me to learn that JJ made his own story suggestions for TLJ as a way to set up his next chapter.

 

Good point. But the originals are so good, more like limiting the Beatles to songs John sings.

 

But The Hobbit did take 1 small book of material and turn it into 3 films, which stretched it too thin. While also leaving out key scenes from said small book. You're killing me Peter Jackson.

But the Star Wars universe should be limitless, but they need to do a better job of making me buy into the characters if they are going to leave the originals behind.

 

Although, throughout the development and production of Last Jedi JJ was not going to be the director of episode IX. And I imagine most of Colin Trevorrow’s ideas were tossed, even if he talked them over with Johnson.

I think it has to be considered that these films are enormous undertakings. Not just because of how much work they are, but because of the expectations placed upon them. So it’s all anyone can do to make one of them, let alone try to plan out three of them at once.

 

Maz and the light saber were dropped, unless they revisit it in the next one. Phasma and Snoke were hyped, but amounted to nothing. Finn and Rey's feelings for each other.

Those all feel like setups from Force Awakens that were dropped.