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Post #1146104

Author
Cobra Kai
Parent topic
The Last Jedi: Official Review and Opinions Thread ** SPOILERS **
Link to post in topic
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/1146104/action/topic#1146104
Date created
20-Dec-2017, 11:13 AM

I was really disappointed with Rey.

In TFA, she was likable, but really too powerful to be a compelling character. I was hoping RJ would somehow rectify this, but after watching I felt that she was again massively underserved as a character.

Just like TFA, she doesn’t really struggle or grow in this movie.
What does she learn? What inner challenges does she face during the course of the movie? What must she overcome at the end of the movie, setting up her character for the 3rd act in the trilogy? Nothing…

They briefly touch on a few aspects of her character but there is no focus to any of it, and thus we don’t know anything else about her that we didn’t know halfway through TFA, other than she is still a badass with a lightsaber.
Since Luke doesn’t serve as a mentor, she doesn’t actually go through any sort of training. She briefly tells Luke that she is afraid of what’s inside her, but that doesn’t come up again. They touch on her fears surrounding her identity, parents, and abandonment on Jakku, but that’s also not a main theme of the movie and doesn’t lead anywhere.

She spends most of her time on the island trying to get through to Luke and Kylo, but very little time learning the ways of the force and facing her inner-demons. Maybe if RJ hadn’t included a bunch of silly nonsense like the meaningless, Finn-Rose subplot, he could have spent more time actually developing the main character and focusing on the main theme of the movie.

To Rian’s defense, though, he inherited the whole “depressed-hermit-Luke” scenario from TFA, so it is kind of hard to have Luke be the wise teacher, if he is in such a dark place that it caused him to run away from everything. That’s one of the main reasons I disagree with sending Luke to that island in the first place. I think it would have worked much better to just go ahead and make Luke the mentor in TFA.