Couldn’t it be that -GASP- the character is supposed to be more powerful than Luke? Everyone’s treating this like they failed to portray a character on roughly ANH-era Luke’s level believably, but since when is that the cap on Force aptitude in this universe? Maybe Rey just does better than Luke because she is better than Luke.
Yeah not to mention Luke had never flown an X Wing before and he had all of one day of training in the ways of the force and yet Darth Vader who in that movie takes out most of the other rebel pilots and according to that movie killed all the Jedi senses that the force is strong with Luke and Vader has a lot of trouble getting a beat on Luke. So clearly the force works that way.
Also there is the name of the movie, maybe it isn’t just a name like Attack of the clones, maybe it means something, you know like film titles are supposed to. Maybe the name The Force Awakens means that the force is coming back from a long sleep and it is going to be a more active part in this trilogy then it ever has been up to this point. Maybe it has something to do with whatever “The First Jedi Temple” that Luke has been looking for is.
It seems to me a lot of people are judging this film and the characters when we only have one third of the story.
If you judge Star Wars on it’s own there are a lot of plot holes and unanswered questions in that movie too, after all if all the questions and issues had been dealt with in that movie then the other two movies would have just been retreads. Also there is no such thing as a movie without a single plot hole, even Citizen Kane has at least one plot hole in it, and that is my favorite movie.
Oh and because I know someone is going to bring up these two points I will just answer them right now. First Rey knows about the Falcon and it’s upgrades because she was the one who installed them, the guy who had the Falcon was the same guy who she was selling stuff to in exchange for food. She says she has been on the ship before so it is logical to assume that she was the one doing the grunt work of installing the upgrades for that guy.
Second when it comes to her defeating Ren if you know anything about the way swords work or the history of warfare then it makes perfect sense. One of the reasons the upper classes in ancient times were the only ones who used swords was that they cost a lot of money and if you want to be any good with them you have to practice every day and you have to do that just to keep your skills sharp and the only people who had the time to do that were the upper classes who didn’t have to worry about spending 99% of their time growing their own food so they wouldn’t starve. Now Ren is so full of himself I don’t see him as being the type who would keep practicing after he had killed everyone who used Lightsabers in the galaxy, we don’t see him use his saber in real combat before that point in the movie. Now him being full of himself also means that he isn’t going to see Finn or Rey as a threat and he wants to turn Rey so he really isn’t trying to kill her. Now add to that the fact that it must have been at least a decade since he was last in a fight and he has not really been practicing and you have the perfect conditions for him to be surprised for a few seconds and get one of his arms chopped off. That is all that happens, Rey strikes back in rage for less then thirty seconds and he loses a limb and can’t fight. Honestly for someone who I can’t see practicing every day and was described as not having completed his training, it really wasn’t that surprising an outcome and as I said since Rey seems to be tapping into what the OT described as the Dark Side of the force in order to win, it doesn’t make her perfect, if anything it makes her more flawed then Luke ever was and it explains why Luke doesn’t want to take the Saber from her in the end, he can sense that she has given into the dark side of the force already.
Honestly calling the character a Marry Sue when we don’t even know her whole story yet and two thirds of her plot arc have yet to be shown in theaters just strikes me as silly and short sighted and I don’t think things are going to play out in the next two movies the way the people applying this label think they will.
I mean the next movie is already being described as darker by the cast of this one so I am guessing that since Rey is the main character, her character will be at least one of the things we will see more of a dark side of.
In short the Marry Sue label makes no sense to me based on this movie alone, and even if it did since it is planned as the first of three movies for this character, applying it two Rey when we only have this film to go on seems premature at best.