Sure, I fully agree that it is retconning. I’ve never said otherwise and I’ve never defended it.
You seem to be jumping into the middle of a discussion and drawing wrong conclusions about who is arguing what.
“Official” is a word that one can lawyer to death. But I think it is absolutely true that most all movies have a title registered with the various unions and trade organizations as well as in several legal documents which establish LLCs and copywriter/trademark. In fact this language is usually the last line in almost every credits crawl.
That said, it’s absurdly pedantic to have this argument. If George goes through the trouble to change what’s on screen but doesn’t bother to update the corporate letterhead I know which one viewers and fans are going to care about.
That’s entirely possible. Maybe gaslighting is the better term. 
You’d think so, and yet here we are.
Personally, I think it’s been all downhill ever since they retconned the title from being Adventures of the Starkiller As Taken From The Journal of the Whills, Saga 1: The Star Wars.
It’s canon that Rey learned to pilot on a flight simulator, and later did pilot a scavenged ship (but was cheated out of it). Of course, the usual arguments of “but it wasn’t in a movie” can always be applied.
@everyone explaining to me what a T-16 is:
I realize now my rhetorical question was unclear. I wasn’t actually asking for information. I was making the point that the only reference we get in dialogue to Luke being a pilot* before he jumps into the cockpit of the Galaxy’s most advanced space superiority fighter is an a allusion to a “T-16”, with no indication in the movie itself of what that is. For a very long time, I assumed a “T-16” was the model of the landspeeder we see him driving, since that’s the only vehicle we see him piloting in the entire movie before he’s suddenly portrayed as an ace fighter pilot.
*A point that Miller partially corrected me on - it’s actually one of two references in dialogue to Luke being a pilot.
Obi-Wan mentions Luke’s skills as well, in the scene where they’re talking about Luke’s father (“I understand you’ve become quite a good pilot yourself”). I think there’s plenty of information in the film to establish that Luke knows how to fly. He may not know hyperspace navigation, but I don’t think that’s quite the same. And I don’t remember Han giving Luke any instruction on the Falcon’s gun turret. He just tells him they’re not out of the woods yet, points him to one of the turrets, and they start blastin’. The only bit of dialogue from Han that I remember was “You in, kid? Good.”
It’s been a long time since I’ve seen The Force Awakens, but I seem to recall Rey telling Finn “I’m a pilot” just before they steal the Falcon. That’s just about as much piloting backstory as Luke got, and it’s good enough for me. Especially if you go with the notion that Rey is Force-sensitive.
As for the title, I do still tend to call the original film just “Star Wars,” but I don’t take it so seriously as to get upset about other people using “A New Hope.” I agree it’s kind of a silly thing to argue about.
@everyone explaining to me what a T-16 is:
I realized after posting that my reply came off as much more brusque than I intended. I apologize. What I should have posted was:
Thank you for the information on the T-16. I apologize for the confusion, but I wasn’t actually asking for information the T-16, I was clumsily making a rhetorical point that the movie itself doesn’t establish what a T-16 is.
Ok, fair enough. Since I clearly don’t remember nearly as much about the movie as I thought I did, I won’t press the point any further.
I hope that I didn’t come off as trying to show you up, or anything. I was just trying to add a little more information. As I said, I agree with your larger point that I don’t think Rey’s abilities are that much more unreasonable than Luke’s, which nobody complained about.
@ekedolphin , what in the world is that picture supposed to mean? A small plastic chameleon sitting on someone’s head?
This is why we use our words, here.
You got a mouse in your pocket?
While I agree Luke suddenly getting drafted into the X-wing squadron was a stretch (unless you want to fanwank that they had an excess of ships and no other qualified pilots, and were otherwise expecting to be overrun), there’s lots of dialog sprinkled in to the movie (and deleted scenes) that at least point towards his competencies in similar aircraft.
And during the assault on the Death star, he’s not suddenly showing up the other pilots with his aerobatic skills, he’s performing what seems to be standard WW2 fighter pilot maneuvers. Beyond the ability to blind fire a torpedo into a womp-rat sized exhaust port, he doesn’t display much of any special skill beyond the rest of his squadron.
Maybe this has more to do with the over use of whiz-bang special effects, but Rey has about five minutes inside a junkyard ship that “hasn’t flown in years”, and she’s suddenly outmaneuvering TIE pilots, pulling off crazy hair-pin turns and flips, and zooming through the internals of a wrecked star destroyer with literally inches to spare. 30 minutes later, she’s suggesting engineering modifications/improvements to the Millennium Falcon that baffle Han.
This is all despite living what seems to be a hand-to-mouth existence immediately prior.
The T-16 would have been used in the movie, but the full-sized prop was never finished. (Budget reasons?)
In A New Hope, Luke is seen playing with a model of a T-16, which in reality was the prop miniature built by Colin Cantwell. The actual prop could not be completed, and an incomplete hull can be seen as a matte painting in the background.
Plus the aforementioned deleted scenes mentioning his piloting skills
(BTW, there was a more recent Luke action figure that came with a tiny T-16.)
While I am one of the people on the side of “the title changed in 1981, and damn your meddling hands, Lucas!”, I still call the movie that came out in 1977 simply Star Wars. Or Star Wars: The Real One.
Hell, they put Randy Quaid in an F18 in Independence Day with no training! He was just a crop duster.
Wait, maybe that’s not the best example…
It is established at the beginning of the film that she is scavenging parts from star destroyers, so she presumably knows enough about how they work to know what is valuable and what is not. That is not from a throwaway line, but from what we actually see happening on the screen. So maybe the piloting is a out of nowhere, just like it is for Luke as far as what we see on screen, but knowing how an engine works is not.
//i\\
Oh, no, not at all. But after I claimed that there was only one line of dialogue establishing Luke’s piloting skills, two posters pointed out other lines of dialogue that established Luke as a pilot which I hadn’t remembered, at which point I realized I didn’t remember the movie nearly as well as I thought I did.
Gee, Pedro Pascal is a *lot* older than I thought
(Ok, only in profile. But anyway, it’s an easy cast for the gritty reboot)
The president also flew one. While he was indeed a retired pilot, in terms of plausibility, it’s…yeah.
Tough day for the secret service.
I think there’s worlds of difference between:
- Recognizing what is valuable
- Knowing how something works
- Knowing how to fix something broken
- Knowing how to improve upon an existing design
And then being able to immediately know how to do those tasks on an unfamiliar piece of hardware.
I know this is movie logic and all, and there’s certainly stuff within the film that supports Rey being a talented mechanic with lots of experience. It just breaks my suspension of disbelief when she’s both a mechanical genius when it comes to the Millennium Falcon (better than Han/Chewie) an amazing pilot (better than Han/Chewie/Lando), knows Jedi mind tricks and force-pulls, swings a lightsaber better than Obi-wan, etc, all conveniently within the first 5 minutes of being exposed to a problem that first required it.
And despite living as this superhuman pilot and mechanic, and presumably being recognized for these skills, she’s practically homeless with zero opportunities beyond bartering scrapped components for her next meal on Jakku.
I think a big part of it is simply that this is a modern movie with access to modern special effects. If you look at the action scenes with the Millennium Falcon in A New Hope, it’s clear they couldn’t really make the thing do much more than fly in a straight line. By Empire, they can show it maneuvering through an asteroid field. By Jedi, it can fly through the middle of the Death Star, making last second twists and turns to avoid crashing, pretty much the way Rey does in TFA.
In ANH, Luke, with some civilian flight experience but absolutely no combat training, is able to perform slightly better than trained military pilots (both the Imperial pilots he shoots down, and his squad mates, who mostly do not return from the mission). In TFA, Rey, with some civilian flight experience but absolutely no combat training, is able to perform slightly better than trained military pilots - the TIE pilots are also able to fly through the wrecked interior of a Star Destroyer, and (mostly) survive, and while Rey and Finn win the fight, the movie does a good job of selling the idea that its a difficult fight, and that they’re in genuine danger. The main difference between the two scenes is mostly that the baseline for what a skilled pilot can do with a spaceship in Star Wars has been raised because the filmmakers have the technology to do more impressive shots.
Also, Han is canonically not that good at spaceship maintenance. The entire plot of ESB is driven by him being unable to fix a hyperdrive.
(Oddly, the pilot whose skill I had the most trouble with in TFA was Poe. Sure, he’s established from the beginning as “the best pilot in the Resistance,” but his fight scene on Tokodana didn’t look like a skilled pilot dominating his opponents, it looked like a guy playing a video game with cheats enabled.)