Actually: *SPOILERS* (Off-Topic)

by cheapLEY , Tuesday, December 22, 2015, 12:37 (3262 days ago) @ cheapLEY

So, not a refutation of every point, just most of them.

3. Kylo Ren, a powerful Force-user, fights a light saber duel with an ex-janitor who has never held a light saber and yet (a) never uses the Force on his opponent, though doing so would have ended the duel immediately, and (b) barely wins the fight, suggesting that he is simultaneously one of the least strategic wielders of the Force the Dark Side has ever seen and, despite his training, absolutely terrible with a light saber. None of this stops Kylo Ren from designing and building his own, completely impractical cross-barred lightsaber.

I see this complaint all the time, and it's stupid. He handily wins the fight against Finn; it's not even close. Keep in mind that he's wounded. But how do we know what Finn's training is? Finn fights another Stormtrooper with that electrified club thing; maybe Finn has trained with that thing? He handled himself alright in that fight, so it's a possibility.

Also, Kylo Ren is powerful. He doesn't need to use the Force to dispatch a Stormtrooper. We also don't know how much training he's actually had with a lightsaber. He's not anywhere close to as proficient as Vader was, but everyone seems to think he's already this super bad ass villian when the movie pretty clearly shows us he's not.

4. Rey becomes nearly as effective a Force-user in a few hours as Luke Skywalker did in a few years.

I think that's intentional, and it's supposed to show us both that Rey is very powerful with the Force and that Kylo Ren isn't as well-trained and badass as he thinks he is.

6. The reason Ren was slowly bleeding to death -- instead of being dead by Rey's hand -- is that a massive a chasm had just miraculously opened up in the several feet between the two of them. Such bad timing for Rey! (Damn you, deus-ex-geology!)

Well there was a massive earthquake happening from the explosion and destabilization. Sure, lucky that it separated them. Not worth being upset about.

7. Rey, who has never left her home planet since she was a child, can speak Wookie. Nobody can speak Wookie -- it's a running joke in the Star Wars universe. But Rey being able to speak Wookie surprises neither her, Han Solo, nor Chewbacca himself.

Can she? I honestly don't remember her answering Chewie, but I've only seen it once so I might have just missed it.

8. It's okay that Poe survived a Tie Fighter crash; after all, so did Finn. But has any film ever cared less about (a) giving the false impression a character has died, and then (b) having that character show up later with no one being surprised by it? Even Finn doesn't seem to care very much what the explanation is.

Did anyone actually believe Poe was dead? I would call that person naive.

11. Kylo Ren is the head of the Knights of Ren, but there are no other Knights of Ren in the movie.

Plot hole doesn't mean what he thinks it means, I don't think. Just because they're not in the movie doesn't mean they don't exist. Also he's wrong, as they're in Rey's vision.

12. Captain Phasma is supposed to be a big-deal character in The Force Awakens, if the merchandising and casting are any indication, and yet (a) how bad of a commanding officer do you have to be, how thoroughly inept in military tactics and strategy, to command the worst-trained fighting force in the Galaxy (the Stormtroopers hit even less with their blasters in The Force Awakens than in any preceding Star Wars film); (b) she's only in three scenes, in one of which she relays an order from Kylo Ren to initiate a massacre of innocents (hardcore!) and in another of which she immediately surrenders to Han, Rey, and Finn as soon as they encounter her and then does exactly everything they ask of her (pathetic!), making her character incomprehensible; and (c) in her third scene she effectively reveals that Finn's character is incomprehensible, as she notes that he has in fact been trained since birth to obey all orders, and has never in his life disobeyed even a single order until the day he decides to act like he's never been trained, indoctrinated, or dehumanized at all.

Okay, agreed, Phasma was underused and kindof stupid.

13. Really? Was there no previous order Finn had ever refused to execute? Was the slaughter on Jakku actually the first naughty thing the First Order had ever required of him?

Well, he's a space garbage man, so maybe?

14. Finn is an ex-janitor who goes AWOL from a Stormtrooper force numbering in the tens of thousands. Yet he is absolutely convinced, despite being someone of no importance whatsoever to the First Order, that he will be chased across the galaxy for having defected. Apparently, there's a premium on janitors in this quadrant of the Galaxy. Sure, Finn killed some people during his escape, but doesn't the First Order emphasize with every tactical decision it makes that it considers its soldiers thoroughly expendable, and don't they quite obviously have much bigger fish to fry during the events of The Force Awakens than to worry about Finn? Why wouldn't this be obvious to him?

Okay, he's a janitor. I don't think he's privy to all the First Order's grand plans. He's probably been indoctrinated to think that abandoning the First Order will lead to a manhunt and is the worst thing he could ever do. That's how ruling by fear works.

16. By the end of the movie, the impression is left that every single First Order soldier is dead besides Supreme Leader Snoke, General Hux, and Kylo Ren.

Are we given that impression? Was every single Imperial soldier killed aboard the first Death Star? I certainly wasn't given that impression.

17. Why does General Hux need to gather all of his troops just to tell them he's about to press a button and destroy the entire Republic? Can't he do that without a cattle-call of his entire army? Because it really ends badly for him, putting his entire army on the very planet he's about to make Resistance Target #1. No chance anybody saw that coming?

It's a dramatic show of force and probably some sort of morale booster for his troops. It's what they've been working for. Making a sort of ceremony around it isn't that peculiar.

19. Why wasn't the Resistance able to access R2D2's data archives at any point over the course of the many years Luke was gone? Why did they, instead, simply prop him up in a corner, when they had to know that he knew Luke's whereabouts -- as he always has in the past?

It seemed pretty clear to me that Luke did something to him to make it impossible to retrieve that information until the time was right.

21. Kylo Ren has such a Force-enabled sense of where his father is in the Galaxy that when his father lands on Starkiller Base, Ren immediately exclaims to himself, "Solo!" Yet a few minutes later, when Ren is just twenty feet from Solo, he can't detect him -- and actually starts searching for him in the wrong direction.

The exact same thing happens in A New Hope. Vader senses Obi-Wan's presence, but doesn't know exactly where he is.

24. Rey says that the Millennium Falcon is "garbage" and hasn't been flown in many, many years. Indeed, it's such junk, in her view, that she won't even board it when she's about to be ripped to pieces by twenty Tie Fighters. Then she gets on board and it basically flies perfectly. So much so that it's not at all clear why no one has been flying it, let alone why its owner (Unkar Plutt) hasn't tried to sell it at any point over the past dozen years -- despite the fact that Plutt appears to live in a hovel.

It's the Millennium Falcon, that's sort of the running joke. Yeah, everyone thinks it's garbage, but it's not, and it's basically indestructible and just keeps on running. Also, maybe he hasn't sold it because to him it's like that rusted out, beat up '67 Mustang that he'll fix up "someday".

25. Why does Plutt offer Rey 250 times her usual pay for BB-8 and then, when she says "no," simply tell some of his heavies to just steal it? If Plutt is enough of a baddie to order it stolen at all, why not just steal it from the outset instead of first offering some random urchin the biggest financial windfall she's ever seen?

Because it's often much, much easier to buy something than it is to take it by force. And more importantly, because that moment informs us on Rey's character more than her simply fighting a few dudes to protect him would.

26. Maz Kanata is a friend to the Resistance. So why is she hiding Luke's light saber from them? Wouldn't she give them anything she could to help them find Luke, and doesn't it in fact turn out (as anyone could have supposed) that Luke's light saber is indeed helpful in tracking the last Jedi down?

Where was is said Maz Kanata is a friend to the Resistance? She's a friend of Han Solo, the smuggler, who doesn't have anything to do with the Resistance.

29. Who trained Rey to fight with a staff as effectively as she does, given that (a) she is an orphan with no friends or family, and (b) she has never been in a battle, but is, rather, merely a scrap-metal scavenger?

That's an awful lot of assumption about someone we've know for all of five minutes of her 20-something year life. How do we know she's never been in a battle? In fact, I'd bet you're wrong and that she's had to fight plenty to survive on Jakku.

30. If Finn is such a good guy that he would try to save Rey the moment he saw she was in distress, doesn't it further call into question just how in the world the order to kill civilians on Jakku was the first time he'd ever had qualms about doing something the First Order had asked him to do?

Again, he was a garbage-man. It seemed pretty clear that was the first time he'd seen combat.

31. Given that all Poe knows about Finn is that he's a First Order defector, why does he seem happy to see Finn just seconds after (and perhaps as) BB-8 tells him Finn is alive? There's no real reason for Poe to trust Finn -- or care about his well-being -- at all. Rather, he would assume, as anyone would, that whatever Finn did or did not do on Jakku, he surely had committed other atrocities for the First Order (and killed many a Resistance fighter) before then.

You wouldn't be happy to see the person that saved your life?

33. Why does Kylo Ren assign just a single Stormtrooper to guard Rey, the most valuable prisoner in the history of the First Order?

Why wouldn't he? She's locked up pretty securely.

34. How do the Rathtars on Han's freighter get loose? If he's just keeping them loose in the hanger, why don't they kill him when he's walking through the freighter toward the Millennium Falcon, or at any other time? And if he's got them chained up, how do they escape?

That's literally explained in the movie. Pay attention instead of trying to find things to point out on the internet.

36. Why are all Stormtroopers human (or humanoid)? If by the time of the First Order any clones being raised to be Stormtroopers are no longer clones of Jango Fett, why aren't there now Stormtroopers of every species as well as every (human) race? Why aren't there flying Stormtroopers from the same species as, say, Watto (from The Phantom Menace)?

I guess maybe it's not canon anymore, but the Empire used to be basically a bunch of racists and didn't want anything to do with anyone that wasn't human.

37. If basically everyone in the Galaxy knows the Force is not a myth -- for instance, every single Stormtrooper in the First Order, who has seen Kylo Ren use it or heard tell of him using it; every single person in the Resistance, who knows the Resistance is looking for Luke Skywalker; every single person in the Republic, which was first established in part by the heroism of the Jedis -- how is the existence of the Force a total shock to Rey? Jakku is sheltered, but as we know from the film (cf. Lor San Tekka) there are many people on Jakku who either have seen the Force first-hand or heard first-hand accounts of it from visitors to the planet.

I've seen this point a lot, too. What it boils down to, I think, is that not many knew about the Force to begin with, and the Empire spent the better part of 40 years erasing the Jedi and the Force from history books everywhere. In A New Hope, people that worked directly with Vader didn't believe in the Force.

I also get the impression that not many people know the full legacy of Luke Skywalker. The only one that knows what happened in the second Death Star is Luke anyone that Luke happened to tell, which probably only amounts to Leia and Han.

TL:DR; the author of this piece is bad and he should feel bad (and pay more attention the movies he's trying to bash online).