Hey, the Force has excellent piloting skills! 
It guides those who have a connection with it. They don’t need to train.
It’s a screenshot of Pascal from Tangled; he gave that look to Flynn and Maximus when they kept fighting.
It’s my way of asking you guys to stop derailing the topic by talking about the freakin’ title crawl of the original Star Wars movie.
That’s not a fair comparison, though, because the Falcon is a much larger ship than the TIE fighters. A tight squeeze for the Falcon is a roomy wide corridor for a TIE fighter. Plus, of course, whatever Rey’s mechanical skills, at that time she hasn’t had a chance to fix up the Falcon yet, and it’s been spending the last couple of decades rusting in a junkyard. It’s a miracle that it still flies at all, and you’re certainly not going to get the best performance out of it.
It’s not that much larger, maybe three time the width of a single-pilot star fighter. I definitely would not call flying through the wrecked Star Destroyer a “roomy wide corridor.”
But if you want a more on-point comparison, Rey - who is in her physical prime and a very strong Force user - performs about as well piloting the MF as Lando, a middle aged, non-mystical smuggler whose spent the last few years piloting a desk as the administrator of Cloud City.
Perhaps, but “Star Wars has an unrealistic idea about vehicle maintenance” is a different criticism than “Rey is a Mary Sue.”
I’m with you on that one. As much as I’m bagging on Rey, Poe is worse in terms of pilot believability. Not only does he have a Force aim-bot enabled, but somehow “best pilot” means he’s also the only guy with a “physics disabled” button in his X-wing. You totally lose all narrative tension in that scene the instant you bring in a superhuman to save the day.
Taking a step back… I think it’s also possible to hold the positions:
(1) Rey is implausibly and instantly good at a wide variety of skills, in a fashion that the text of the movie does not support, and this makes the movie somewhat worse than it would be if her skills were better justified
(2) this is more true of her than, say, Luke
and
(3) people who go on and on about the above and call Rey a “Mary Sue” and go on and on about SJWs ruining Star Wars are massive jackasses
I think responding to those people by actually having the debate they want to have and trying to find in-movie justifications for everything Rey does is just a losing proposition. It’s letting them define the debate, as if somehow if they can prove that Rey is a 10% better pilot than the text justifies well, then, they’re right and you’re wrong and SJWs ARE the real phantom menace.
I’m not sure who “they” refers to in this sentence?
The people who heap venom on the sequel trilogy, with particular (and telling) focus on any character who is not a white male. Gamergate-but-focused-on-Star-Wars, basically.
Okay, but I don’t think that matches the description of anyone in this thread.
Agreed… and maybe I’m a bit too hyper-aware of their presence lurking around the internet in general.
I think you could make that argument if this were the very first Star Wars movie. But Force prodigies being gifted in multiple areas is already an established in-universe trope by the time Rey comes around. There’s absolutely nothing implausible about it by that point.
This is a good point. It may be dumb but Rey doesn’t show any skills that little ani doesn’t show in Ep 1. He can build anything and fly anything at least as well as any adult around him at least she has some basis for possibly flying before.
She also has some basis for combat with something other than a blaster with her staff(?) that we see her use when she introduced. Those skills would not necessarily translate directly to using a light saber but would make in not be completely foreign as it is when Luke is first trying to use it.
//i\\
Yeah, “No human has ever won a pod race, except this eight year old child who built his own pod racer out of scrap,” is waaaaaay more bullshitty than anything Rey does. But “This stupid thing in a movie you didn’t like is justified by this even more stupid thing in a different movie you didn’t like!” is probably not the most persuasive argument.
Fair point but at least there is some in world justification for force sensitive wonder kid even if it is midicolorians.
I’ve kind of lost track of what side I’m on here, but… it’s different. We are very clearly told “Annakin is exceptional and the only human who can pod race and is very good at pod racing”, and certainly he lives in a junk yard and clearly has spent years tinkering and building things. It’s pretty bananas that he would be so gifted, but it’s right there in what people say on screen and what we see him do that he is gifted. (Then later on The Force is presumably the explanation).
Rey, on the other hand, is maybe not as over the top gifted (she’s a grown-up after all, if a young one). But she keeps piling on skill after skill at a super high level without those skills (some of them at least) being previously alluded to or explained. (Nor is it explained why she is unable to monetize those skills).
Feel free to groan more at one than the other, but they’re really two different kettles of fish.
That right there is the root cause and fundamental problem with the most recent trilogy. TPTB let the directors actually affect the overall storyline, which IMO is a huge no-no in a franchise that works like this, especially when you have a series of 3 movie trilogies that tell a specific section of the story.
Rather than look at a Star Wars film as something that you hire an auteur to do, they should take a page from TV production, and look at the directors as something less than all that. Plenty of TV shows have different directors all the time during a single season, and yet manage to keep a coherent and often tight storyline over the course of a season, and indeed across multiple seasons.
I see no reason that the same sort of thing shouldn’t be true for Star Wars films.
That. And who knows how incredibly user friendly those fighters might be? Eespecially when you have a droid for a co-pilot. Part of Artoo’s job might just be intuiting what Luke is trying to do and making it happen. Maybe the x-wing is the self-driving Tesla of a long long time ago.
The TV shows have the “show runner” who is controlling the big narrative decisions. Someone has to be coordinating this. George Lucas doing it while other people directed Empire and Jedi was fine. The problem is when nobody does it, or when it’s handed off to people who are not competent like JJ Abrams.
The unspoken truth is that if they had just had Johnson do the whole trilogy it would have been fine. There is very little wrong with The Last Jedi that isn’t a legacy of problems that TFA saddled it with. You have emotionally stunted people whining about precisely what it does well (breaks new ground and refuses to remake prior movies), people who can’t handle the fact that it has multiple female characters, and on this board, people posting like 100 times about how outraged they are that a specific space battle tactic wasn’t given a long explanation about “how it works” by de-hoosifying the trilistium scarmholes or some other Star Trek bullshit that doesn’t actually explain anything or add anything at all to the narrative, e.g. people who want Star Wars to be Star Trek and shouldn’t be listened to.
Certainly in terms of actually making a movie that is good by the standards of movies and not by the sort of pandering bullshit that Disney prefers, TLJ was at least a three-star effort, and I suspect it could have been even better it it didn’t have to deal with some of the crap from the prior film. Kathleen Kennedy is the problem only to the extent that she hired JJ Abrams, who is the real problem. If Lucas or Spielberg didn’t want to do the sequels then they should have offered the whole project to Johnson to start with and this would be an entirely different conversation.
I don’t know that someone being improbably super good at something is really justified by having a character standing next to them saying, “Wow, you really are improbably super good at that!” Rey’s a Force prodigy like Anakin was, she just doesn’t have a Greek chorus following her around pointing it out to everyone. All else being equal, I’d say that was stronger writing, not weaker.