So, what did RJ do? Did he go back to the 1977 concept of anyone who works hard at it, can be a Jedi? No, he didn’t. Rey just magically has these powers, and apparently so does the kid at the end of the film. No work required. It just awakes inside you. So, what if the Force doesn’t awake in Poe, or Finn, or some other random person?
Tough luck, I guess? Or can we expect the Force to be delivered to them as well? It got lost in the mail, or something. I think not. In short, he’s turned the Force into a lottery. Anyone can be a Jedi, if you’re one of the lucky few. I fail to see how that improves on Lucas’ original ideas, even the version of the PT, where despite the Jedi’s elitist views, anyone could theoretically become a Jedi.
Firstly let me just state that I hate the idea of Force ability being genetic. Even though this was annoyingly introduced in ROTJ as a way of validating the sudden choice of Leia as the ‘other’ (as opposed to the original idea of a sister who was being trained even as Luke was), it was at least a pretty vague notion ie the Force runs strong in my family.
Of course midichlorins changed all this!
I was actually a defender of Rey’s Mary Sue-ness in TFA. I figured she had essentially ‘self-trained’ under the harshness of her conditions without really knowing it - the same way little Anakin had honed his piloting skills without any knowledge of what he was unconsciously tapping into. I didn’t mind that she extrapolated ‘mind tricks’ from her encounter with Kylo, and again figured her environment had caused her to advance along these channels in an innocent way. For the duel with Kylo I again felt that she was just a naturally good fighter, he was significantly injured, and it ended up being more of a street fight than a Jedi showdown. That was my take anyway.
TLJ screwed this all up for me. She didn’t get any training from Luke, but apparently she’s a full-blown Samurai now. I could have lived with that, but the scene with the rocks was stupid. Yoda’s lifting Luke’s X-wing in TESB was a demonstration of mastery. Rey’s tossing CGI boulders around like styrofoam was purely 'cos she can. Hell, she was as surprised as I was!
I was really on the fence with this film. As always my ‘head canon’, which does its own thing in the same way my body rejects viruses, seems to have purged this movie and TFA along with it.