Yeah, I know what you mean. The Special Edition doesn't help either by extending and adding that CGI stuff.

I like how the performance ends abruptly with Jabba throwing that disgusted dancer to the Rancor though. Shows the cruelty of the guy.

The thing about Anakin is that while Lucas seemed to be going down the same path with him in Ep 1, he course corrected in Ep 2.  We see Anakin after he has been training for a few years, yet he still isn't a Jedi master.  He gets his ass handed to him when he decides to fight Count Dooku, and loses a hand because of it. 

Rey, on the other hand, just touches a lightsaber and is almost a Jedi master.  She read Kylo's mind, even though he was trying to read hers.  She uses a Jedi mind trick, without even knowing how to even attempt it.  I can't remember, but I even think she had no way of knowing Jedi could do that.  She defeats Kylo, who has been training for at least a decade, even though she never picked up a lightsaber.  And that poor excuse of him being injured or unbalanced is complete BS, because if you rewatch that scene, those things play no part in the actual fight.  He's not overly emotional.  And he has no problem moving around and swinging.  Then, she Force pulls a lightsaber to her, even though, again, she has no idea how to do it, and Kylo was pulling it to him.  Not to mention she can fly and repair the Falcon better than Han, for no good reason other than she is just better than everyone at everything.

And that's just the first film.  In the second film, she takes down Luke with no problem whatsoever.  A freaking Jedi master versus a woman with a staff, and he gets taken down?  She swings around a lightsaber for a little bit, then apparently that makes her a master duelist.  She's confronted by the dark side, and it has no sway on her at all, not even a little.  The only person to give her a problem was Snoke, which he just became a joke because his writing is all over the place.  One minute he's all powerful, the next a childish trick takes him out.  She helps take on Snoke's elite guards.  Then, when they are both pulling the lightsaber towards them and it breaks, she instantly gets up, while Kylo is knocked out for about half an hour.  She then shows up at the end to lift up tons and tons worth of boulders with absolutely no effort whatsoever.  Something that would have strained even Yoda to attempt, if he could even pull it off at all.

And, now, with the third film, it looks like we have Rey at full Neo powers.  With absolutely no training whatsoever.  No origin story for her could explain that away at this point.

I don't get the Mary Sue argument with her. She definitely achieved a degree of control over the force far faster than was reasonable and her proficiency with a light saber was pretty much ridiculous (though she did get her ass kicked by Luke without him breaking a sweat)... hopefully they make an attempt to explain that (Anakin was likewise bizarrely proficient with the force as a young child, so perhaps a connection like that could explain it).

Otherwise, she is not some flawless good guy; I'd argue that she seems more drawn towards the dark side of the force than Luke was. It could be that, since the skywalker trilogy was all about establishing a "balance" in the force", she might wind up being something of a hybrid, but regardless she is not a full blown Mary Sue.

They have some repairing to do after the second film (I will never forgive them for having Luke standing in front of a genuine buffet of Imperial soldiers and Walkers and not just unleashing the culmination of his decades of training and mastering of the force on them) but I think it's not impossible. I care enough about the Skywalker trilogy to give it a shot, and while I expect a ton of rehashing and such from Abrams I'm just hoping for some "good" to close out this story.

Seriously though, Luke standing in front of that huge army and...nothing. The missed opportunity still makes me sick lol

*Edit* Just wanted to say that I otherwise really like the cast of the series, but damn was the overall "lesson" of Last Jedi a muddled mess. The main focus seemed to be on that difficult balance between obedience for the sake of unity and strength but also questioning at what point a person should disobey an authority. In both instances I believe the film got it wrong lol

First, Po ABSOLUTELY should have done what he did given that nitwit they had in charge lead them all to believe they were just going to die without putting up any real effort, and yet he's the one who seemed to be portrayed as being "wrong".

Later, Rose disobeyed orders to save Finn with some sentimental nonsense like "we won't win the war by sacrificing love" or something of that sort. Finn had been fully cognizant of the situation and had decided to make a truly heroic sacrifice to save their movement, and yet she decided to intercede. In doing so Rose essentially doomed them to immediate death and destruction barring some "deus ex machina" miracle which, of course, did appear, and yet Rose was portrayed as having done the right thing, when in the reality she had created they'd have maybe 3 minutes to kiss before they and every one of their rebel friends were murdered because of her actions. Totally seems worth it and not at all selfish of her.

So yeah, the Last Jedi is just a tragedy of missed opportunities and muddled messaging... I hope this next one can redeem the story to some extent.

I'm not saying the Luke thing wasn't a big issue, or even a bigger issue, I'm just saying the Mary Sue thing is pretty much right up there with it.  People seem to complain about both the same amount, so I'd say it's probably something like the #1 issue is Luke's character and Rey being a Mary Sue is a close second.  At this point, no poor retconning of her origin will fix her character, or power levels being maximum after just a few days of "training" herself.  Of course, there was no real training, she just has those powers when she needs them.  Really, I expect the third film to be a muddled mess with all of the rushed retconning they will have to do, as well as cramming in as much fan service they can to try to win back fans.  Or they may not even try to explain away her powers other than she was the "chosen one."  Which still doesn't work, because we already had a chosen one in the franchise, and even he got his ass kicked and his hand chopped off when he decided to go against a trained Sith.  And only after years of training was he powerful enough to defeat him.  Rey, on the other hand, has defeated Kylo twice and knocked Luke down, all with no training.

Yea, there is so much wrong with that film.  Any audience member can come up with a strategy to defeat the Resistance after watching that shitty chase scene for 5-10 mins.  Uh, tell your other ships to light speed in closer OR right in front of them OR you jump away and back closer, since you know where they are.  Of course, the whole addition of fuel and running out of it completely ruins how Star Wars works.  As well as somehow the well-funded Empire has slower ships than a ragtag resistance group?  The lightspeeding through ships destroys every battle in the SW canon, now, since you could have a ship on autopilot or have a droid drive it into any large spacecraft the Empire might have.  In the third film, if every space battle isn't solved this way, it will seem stupid on both sides for not doing it.

And forget 5-10 minutes later, Holdo does it with the whole lightspeed thing before she even gives that speech.  Does that mean Rose doesn't respect her sacrifice and thinks it was a mistake?  The whole movie is a mess of conflicting messages and ideas you would find in a 30 min comedy SyFy show.

We are talking about Star Wars and Anakin so let me drop this here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UENYMsmjDls&feature=youtu.be

:D

Looks a whole lot of meh, the trailer for the last one looked 'meh' but ended up bad.

She's a Mary Sue, because she meets the textbook criteria for it.  Here's a good vid to explain it.

Of course, this was released before the 2nd movie came out, which just reinforced her Mary Sue status.  She has no origin that would explain her powers.  Even if she was Luke or Obi-Wan's daughter, that explains nothing.  Sure, that would make her Force sensitive, but that doesn't explain her being so powerful with no training.  Even if she had some training as a kid, that doesn't explain it, as even Anakin, the Chosen One, had to go through a decade or more of training to defeat a trained Sith.  Her having a year or two of it, at best, when she was young just doesn't cut it.

She knocked Luke to the ground with no real struggle.  She helped take on elite guards with no lightsaber training.  The force of an exploding lightsaber to their faces knocks out Kylo for probably a half an hour, but she gets up instantly without any sign that it hurt.  She can lift up boulders that even Yoda would struggle with, yet she didn't even break a sweat. 

Also, what movie did you watch?  Sure, she confronted the Dark Side when she meditated, but that means absolutely nothing considering it had no affect on her at all.  No corruption.  Not even a hint that she wants to use its power.  She even went into the "Dark Side cave" and nothing happened to her.  When given the choice to pick a more grey path with Kylo, she refused without any real hesitation.  Every Jedi has been teased by the Dark Side, some even corrupted by it, but not MaRey Sue.  She's 100% good.

1) I see where you are coming from an I agree.

Rey starts reading Kylo's mind and emotions, she uses that technique, but I can excuse it with the argument that she is strong with the Force and that Kylo had just used that very interrogation technique on her, so she must have gotten the gist of it or perhaps the idea that she can also do that back to him.

BUT...

... then she comes up with the Jedi trick of using her mind to control a Stormtrooper so that he would release her. Where did she get the idea from? Where did she learn to do that?

Seems like JJ and Co. just wanted to make "old fans" or Star Wars fans see that technique in the movie no matter what and paid no attention on whether it made sense she would be able to do that at that point and even worse yet that begs the question of: what is the need of Jedi training when you have a character that can spit techniques with no training?

This is why Rey's parentage was so important and I would say not necessarily her parentage but what she experienced as a child. I am completely fine with the idea that her parents were nobodies, but the idea that she received some form of Jedi/Sith training could have justified her knowledge of the Force.

2) Yes, the problem here, it seems, is that the writers come off more concerned about making a female character look "good" instead of grounding her in the Star Wars mythos. A female main character should give "little girls" the idea that they can be the protagonists of a story and that stories can be about them, not about causing the delusion that by virtue of gender they can do anything and accomplish everything, because that isn't even true for men.

Her parentage is important to an extent.  That would have made her more prone to being able to use the Force.  However, it doesn't matter if her father was Space Jesus himself, being more prone to use the Force doesn't mean you can master it with no training.  And like I said above, her having a couple years of it in childhood still wouldn't explain it, because she wouldn't have been moving onto the much more difficult training at such a young age and so quickly.  Every Jedi master we have seen has had to go through several years, even decades, of training to get to where they are, even Space Jesus Anakin and Kylo, who Luke alludes to being as powerful as Rey, even though the films have him weaker. 

Of course, I think most would still have forgiven it if in the 2nd film they 1) made her the daughter of someone special and 2) had Luke put her through some actual training on the island.  It would have basically been what Lucas did with Anakin.  In TPM, Anakin is clearly on the Gary Stu path.  Overpowered (though, admittedly not in everything, like Rey) with no real good reason, and pretty much everyone liked him.  However, in the sequels he was corrected to being a character, with flaws and actually having to go through training to achieve his power.  Instead, she was born of no one special and received no training, yet got even stronger in power.

Yea, writers seemed to be on this kick of "girls can do whatever men can do, girl power," good writing be damned.  No one would have a problem with a woman being the most powerful character, or on the same level as the most powerful male, but they HAVE TO EARN IT.  When you just copy/paste other character's powers on to them when its convenient, instead of having them have to go through the same trials to amass those powers, it makes for a weak character.  And it really doesn't help women, it hurts them.  It's like they are saying that women couldn't stand or identify with a flawed character, or one that starts out weak and grows, or God forbid, is trained by a man.  Nope, they have to start out competent in pretty much everything, gain powers when needed, and be almost 100% flawless or those two dimensional women won't like the character/film.

Any of those in this thread? Where?