For everyone arguing that Rey’s power in TFA wasn’t unusual…the creator of that movie made a sequel to it where he acknowledges that it is unusual and explains it by tying her by blood to the most powerful Force user in the galaxy. I don’t remember the name of that movie, it might come to me later.
Regardless, TFA is designed to raise questions about Rey’s parentage and her unusual affinity to the Force. Otherwise TLJ wouldn’t try to explain it by tying it to a Force equation involving Kylo and JJ wouldn’t have tried to make her the spawn of Space Satan.
This isn’t to forgive TFA’s choices - a movie should stand on its own merits. The real issue with Rey’s power in that film is that it requires extra context to appreciate, and not because it’s necessarily unusually strong based on the prior films, but because it feels unearned.
Take the scene of Luke levitating a saber in the Wampa cave. Someone watching this film after the first one could complain that this is a bogus and overpowered new ability, but the scene sells that this power is the only thing that will save Luke’s life and he struggles mightily to achieve it. The music and camerawork, the sense of peril, all were necessary to generate the need for this new power.
Rey in contrast is never in mortal peril in her moments of crisis. Rather, in each one she chooses to pit herself against a superior opponent and comes out on top, sometimes to her own astonishment. And this makes all the difference in terms of earning a power versus merely acquiring it.
Exactly. You shouldn’t have to go outside of a film and rely on a sequel, prequel or even ancillary material in order for it to make sense, each film has to stand on its own and be coherent on its own; you can argue the same for The Empire Strikes Back, except most of its set-ups, specifically Luke dealing with Darth Vader being his father, can be summed up as “What happens next?”, whereas plot holes and inconsistencies aren’t the same as “What happens next?” questions.