Actually: *SPOILERS* (Off-Topic)

by Korny , Dalton, Ga. US. Earth, Sol System, Tuesday, December 22, 2015, 17:56 (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.

Even if you end up scrubbing toilets in the Marines, you still have to go to boot camp... These stormtroopers are shown to be proficient in hand-to hand combat with their zappy clubs, and it's even more clear since Finn's lightsaber technique involves mostly hacking at the opponent (as one would do with a club).

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.

They cast a frail-looking dude to play a troubled kid who likely felt weak and underwhelming all his life, but found power and strength in the dark side. He's very proficient at using the Force, but is mediocre at actual combat. That's a neat bit of characterization, I thought... And he's still in training, since he's not yet a Sith.

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.

Also, she grew up around fighting and dealing with lowlifes. She knows that people aren't as powerful or as intimidating as they act. Plus, she is imitative when it comes to using the force. She learns from what Kylo does.

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.

She understood him, but never spoke Wookie. And it's not a "running joke", if each film showed that multiple people understood him (Lando, the medic, Yoda, C3PO, Han). In fact, I can't think of any instance where the joke was that a person couldn't understand him...
Either way, she grew up in an outpost full of weird low-class aliens. Odds are she would meet a Wookie or two in her life.

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.

Answered below, but yeah, folks should learn movie rules...

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.

I feel like she maybe had more scenes explaining her and her actions (Finn seems to really hate her in particular), but that may be for later...

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.

I thought that they'd come after him for freeing the most valuable prisoner that they had gotten their hands on, and escaping with him after killing multiple stormtroopers and doing thousands (if not millions) of credits worth of damage to their ships and equipment, then stealing another ship with the Droid that was vital to their plans... I dunno, I'd think that would be enough to put a bit of a target on my back...

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.

The specifically started to evacuate a number of their folks. Stands to reason that many of their soldiers had just been in orbit, or off system. Each imperial starship holds thousands and thousands of crewmembers. Why would all of them unload onto the habitable outposts on the giant ice planet?

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.

She is very proficient with her zappy spear/staff that she's clearly had for years. I like that it carried over to her fighting with a lightsaber, as she focused on wide swings and jabs, as one would with a staff.

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?

Not only that, but he honored your absence by completing your super-important mission. I'd be pretty stoked.

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.

And he had no idea that she would be able to use the force to control minds. She failed at it the first couple of times...

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.

Deer Lorde...

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.

The First Order is Cerberus... I can get that...

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.

Would you be aware if an actual psychic lived in a small town near you? Or would stories of psychics seem like fairy tales and lies?
There were hundreds (if not thousands) of planets, people's, and cultures that likely had never seen a Force user, much less one of our heroes...

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).

Yeah, it's a nitpicky click bait article written by some disgruntled moron. I wouldn't put too much stock into it.