When I say the use of the force is akin to a talent/skill, you keep saying "not really." But then you compare it to yoga/meditation, which is a skill of the mind, which is learned and practiced. Yes, there is belief involved, but it's not JUST about belief. Yoda wasn't repeatedly telling Luke to "believe." He was saying "you must feel the force flowing through you" or "concentrate" or "you must learn control."
Right, but that's because the force is an art of indirectness. Yoda does indeed say that "You must learn control", but he's referencing that Luke must learn to control himself, not the force. Again, it's one of those contradictory mystic sayings. To control yourself, you must let go of yourself and so on.
You keep trying to pigeonhole me into saying that using the force is a skill that one can practice and be better at doing. And I say yes, but it's a skill in the same sense that being religious is a skill. Which you seem to be trying to separate out from what your saying so as to establish that Luke should be this good because he trained for that amount of time.
The force is a skill that is practiced through religiousness. You can do things that improve your ability to use it, yes, but it's not the conventional means your trying to frame them as. That's the impasse we're at.
If Rey is a wide-eyed dreamer who believes in the impossible and is not inhibited by doubt in the force like Luke is, could Rey have lifted Luke's X-Wing out of the bay on Ach-Too?
I don't know if she'd succeed, but I would expect that she'd get further than Luke did in his first attempt on Dagobah.
You describe her in terms I agree with 'survivor' 'intelligent' 'intuition'. The issue being that, not only to I NOT see those qualities reflected in her character throughout the films (despite her being set up with these elements!), I see the worst execution of these concepts when appraising the beats of her character. I see a powerhouse that just 'does things with no idea how she did them (by her own admission at times). Because, for instance, in the mind-bending sequence, I don't see HOW she learns or adapts to Kylo, I don't see the 'survivor', nor the intellect, I don't see HOW she was 'clever' in figuring something out, she just comes across as a savant powerhouse. Which is the opposite of her setup as a character, so it's doubly damaging in my eyes.
This is why I wanted Kylo to be even more visibly injured during their duel than he was, I also wanted to see her fight dirty during the fight, emphasizing the classist contrast between them. I, in fact, would have preferred that she won the fight, not by remembering balance, but by combining her natural aptitude w the force in unconventional ways that harken to her out of the box thinking, and her scavenger background. Only for the nearly dead Kylo to comment that she will make an excellent apprentice. Not to say that she would have beaten him by the skin of her teeth, I think it would have been better had she injured him just as much in the forest as she had prior, just in ways that better highlights her qualities as a character.
To me, that combination of him displaying a ting of arrogance even in defeat, while being more gravely injured, would better preserve him as a villain for her in subsequent films, and her not going 'stock Jedi' to defeat him, would have reinforced her character traits. In a way, the traditional image of the Jedi, and Kylo, are very closely aligned when looked at in terms of a classist lens. Rey would have defeated him by virtue of her self, and it would have doubled as a step on her journey to accepting that her parents were never coming back (as she only said they would, as a coping mechanism, and never truly seemed to accept the reality of the world she lived on, or herself as she was defined by it). But in this telling, she'd be able to (symbolically) found the virtues of it, thereby the self that she had spent her life denying.
It's late and I'm very tired, as well as rambling and repeating myself, so I'll call it here for now. My issue is that, and we agree upon this being the question to ask, 'a wizard is doing something', what they have done thus far comes up far short. The very fact that they had to more blatantly spell out her chosen one status (by means of addressing, not as a justification in and of itself) in TLJ, or spend minus recounting that Kylo was deeply fractured in the finale of TFA, is not to me them pounding the 'dumb audience' over the head, but rather an admission that they did not stick the lander in properly conveying the narrative of those elements. Had they done so, there would have been little need for further clarification that took the step beyond simply recapping events of TFA.
Well....there's a lot to discuss here.
First, I want to say that your interpretation of how it would be better to play out is something I can't really counter, as what you see in your head is inevitably going to seem better both because of bias and because it's idealized in a way that won't be as good as if you actually put in the work of writing it down and then seeing it play out. That is unfortunately how art works, atleast in my experience.
All I can do is argue that the way in which we see it happen is legitimate by it's own terms. In regards to Rey turning the mind bend on Kylo Ren, we can't see her intelligence at work in the same way we see Sherlock Holmes work out a problem because, as we've come to agree, there are no known mechanisms to how the Force works, so there are no logical mechanisms we can use to understand how she did this in terms of physics, right? However, we can see how this is going on emotionally and extrapolating on that. You see Kylo Ren attacking her mentally, and she has her head down and turned away, giving a very defensive impression while Kylo Ren is hammering at her. Eventually, she turns to him, because she because she realizes that simply defending is pointless. She finds that pushing back is actually effective. She gets that 'eureka!' moment on her face. So she keeps pushing, and you can see her expression once she realizes that she sees into Kylo Ren's mind as he just saw into hers, which is when she lands the verbal blow by saying he will never be as strong as Vader.
I'm not saying my interpretation of that scene is the only way it could be read...after all, the entire point of 'show, don't tell' is often that it leaves room for varying interpretations of the same event, as what is happening is not striaght up explicitely stated....but if you read the body language, the distinction between Rey displaying survivor's instincts, intelligence, and intuition as opposed to simply 'overpowering' Kylo Ren is the process you see play out in Daisy's acting. This is simply not how I view someone who is just a musclehead that can throw their weight around acting. The process of Rey observing whats happening to her, trying a new solution, and then manipulating it to her advantage is representative of those 3 things I mentioned, whereas if she was 'just that strong', what I imagine we'd see would be her taking on Kylo' attack head on from onset, then then repelling him with a more telekinetic repulsion than digging into his psyche.
That's what I see. I can't really convince you of seeing it and I'm not necessarily trying to, but I can only support how and why I view my version of events as legitimate and hopefully get you to agree that I am making the case well.
As for your comments on Kylo ren in particular, again, I don't want to refute your interpretation as, in your mind, it's an idealized form that plays into your own ideas of what would look best without having to see the imperfect reality it would inevitably take form of, and that's not an attack on you, everyone does that. However, what your describing is essentially making Kylo Ren more 'badass' in the traditional villain sense, and he's simply not written to be that in the conventional sense. He's 'badass' in that he is a capable and powerful fighter, but in terms of personality, he's one of the most insecure, deluded, and impotent (in terms of getting what he wants) characters in the series. Similarly, while Rey is a scavenger and scrapper, that doesn't necessarily entail that she is untalented in fighting unless she's fighting dirty (afterall, when she fought with her staff at her home planet, she did so cleanly). And in particular, doing that in the final fight of TFA wouldn't send a message that was congruous with the theme it's going for, which is that Rey is true Jedi, so her winning through connection with the force (especially while Kylo Ren is at his most distraught) makes sense.
I'm not saying that your version wouldn't work in necessarily any context, but even ignoring the aforementioned bias issues, to implement that sort of thing would turn the Rey's and Kylo Ren's characters, and the theme of the movie, into something else, as opposed to being a better version of what it was trying to go for.
One of these is not like the other. One describes exactly the opposite of the way the force is portrayed in the OT and ST (and as you've described it above). It's scientifically measurable bullshit that got rightfully ditched, post PT.
I agree that this is exemplifying one writer's interpretation, but Midis contradict everything we know about the Force and what defines its power.
Yes and no. Here's the thing: as a storytelling element, the Force is anything the writer wants it to be, because the force is meant to be representative of what is happening in a character's inner soul.
Which is to say that the Force as midiclorions is - let me stress the next word - POTENTIALLY a legitimate interpretation of the force. For example, if the story of PT had been written better and intentionally worked with the interpretation that the Jedi institution has lost it's soul, then the Force working as this scientifically measurable, impersonal tool would be a good use of storytelling. But the prequels weren't actually about that. Again, there is this wierd gulf between the seemingly acknowledged fact that the Jedi institutions were all sorts of fucked up for doing the things they did, but have the story not actually make that a meaningful point. If it had, the prequels might not be the joke they are now.
But they are, because they didn't make it into a meaningful storytelling point, which means that the force being dead inside and impersonal isn't representative of some inner darkness within the jedi council. It's just how the force is in the prequels, without meaning, and THAT is the true disconnect between the prequels and the OT and NT.
