ST Daisy Ridley (Rey) in the ST

I keep meaning to watch Naruto.

 

Yes, Rian was very very very clear about it

 

Permanent scarring from the opponents. And I do mean permanent, like a loss of a limb or a disfigurement on the face. That or Rey actually loses the battle.

 

Or don't have her shrug it off and go back to being awesome and saving everyone like ten minutes later. Luke and Anakin didn't save anyone when they failed, Rey still saves everybody in the end. That's not a "failure."

 

That doesn't explain her internalising of awareness of her limits and letting the force guide her through it, as she had learned on SKB. IF she hadn't done so, she possibly would have come to harm. Her attempt to preempt the destiny she foresaw though, had failed. So she reverted to letting the force be her guide in the moment.during combat.

It would have just been a repeat of the."The force" epiphany moment we had on SKB. That beat was actually updated, rather than replicated, with the "lifting rocks" moment. Which heralds Rey's first successful, premeditated or "conscious" and controlled use of the Force when not under duress.

What you're taking about is rewriting the film to have Rey suddenly thinking that's she's all that with a saber, in spite of demonstrating to herself with the boulder on Ahch-to that she hasn't mastered control in saber wielding yet. And so gets punished for overreaching and failing in that arena. But that's not what her journey is.

 

The point is that with Rey, there is no tension. There is no tension of her lifting the massive rocks because we the audience expect her to do it (and do it with ease). There is no tension with her fighting the Guards because they are not Snoke and Snoke is already dead.

With a lack of tension, Rey feels invincible. And that's boring to a fault.

Even when Luke allowed himself to have the Force flow through him, there was tension. Vader was on his tail and it looks like that he's going to shoot down Luke as he did with the other pilots. There was guarantee that Luke trusting the Force would save him. Thus creating a suspenseful moment.

But Rey, that was always guaranteed. And no amount of novelization and their attempts of retconning the scene can change that. Luke needed no novelization to sell tension on the Death Star Trench run.

 

I didn't know beforehand that Rey would not give in to anger during the fight and so either begin to head towards the darkside and become more prone to being tempted by Kylo or tempted to strike him down in anger. and so on. Or that she wouldn't choose to overstep her limits in controlling the force in combat and lose or be physically harmed in it.

The rocks were substantial. There was no guarantee that she would demonstrate her strength with the force as conspicuously as that. It was intended to appear miraculous in its own small way relative to Luke's achievement, where the real tension was played out in that arena. This is what inspires the stories being told about Crait and those that hear them, as the final scene shows.

I guess it comes down to whether you have expectations that this should have modeled on Luke's perceived emotional low point during the climax of ESB. Rey actually has the emotional low point over the course of her last force meeting with Kylo and the impasse following the realisation that her faith had been used to help eliminate Kylo's competition. But it's not the climax of the movie.

Instead, it's the low point for the resistance movement which is only retrieved when key characters stop fighting their own battles, recklessly pushing their own agendas and punishing themselves because they cannot see a way to return and take a stand without guaranteeing to make things worse in the long run.

The ending of ESB also had the reassuring sight of an intact rebel alliance fleet, ready to quite soon take the battle to the Empire. And Luke cheerily faring well to Lando and Chewie. Reflective but bouyed with a new hand as if nothing truly terrible had happened.

In TLJ, the Resistance barely survives being bled dry and the survivors cornered. Coming back from that would be immeasurably harder if it hadn't been achieved in the way that Luke and Rey, and also Finn and Poe, eventual did. Only after realising their mistakes in presuming what their roles are in all this.

 

I think her emotional climax should have been tied to that if Rian was building it up so much. Really, her ultimate deficiency as a character is the fact that the trilogy largely cares little for how she makes choices. Even when they are ill-advised ones, she succeeds.

One of the worst parts of the the trilogy was easily the fact that it just skips over her making the decision to leave him alive because it treats that choice as if it is a given but it clearly isn't. There is a very clear reason as to why she'd wish to kill him for good. She just saw him double down on everything he had done in the past and she isn't even shown considering the idea of harming him at all. That's just lazy.

 

It established quite clearly on Ahch-to that she's begun to make her choices based on what she believes the force is showing her is her destiny. She comes to believe it's not to stop Kylo Ren but instead to play a role in turning Ben. So why would killing Kylo be seen as a choice if she has that belief?

 

Yeah, it shows her making a choice based on information that isn't received by the audience. Brilliant.

Also, killing Ben would be a choice because he has not only revealed that the only thing he cares about her affinity with the Force when it comes to her, he doubles down on everything he did, he takes the mantle of Supreme Leader for himself and she knows that many more will perish before he's finally done.

 

We are told that through the force she feels it's her destiny to play a role in turning Ben back. We are informed.

 

When are we told that in the movie though? Honest question.

I haven’t read the novel.

 

It was probably in those visions that Rey received that the audience has no idea about.

Don't worry, I'm sure he'll quote it anyway.

 

I got the "idea" from the film. Haven't read the novelisation.

 

This is what the film informs the viewer with.

 

If his response to what occurred was "butcher everyone who doesn't swear allegiance to the genocidal military junta, he probably already made up his mind.

 

That's up to you to speculate. But in the film Ben clearly identified it as the deciding factor. If he'd already made up his mind why is he sleeping, with his supposed enemy free to kill him in his sleep for what he might do?

 

I really thought she just wanted to bring Kylo back to the light. "that through the force she feels she is destined to play a role in turning Ben back" looks too specific, she just believed that she saw his future and she could "save" him. Rey didn't mention to Luke her theory about the force is trying to show her something or whatever

 

Okay, when DID Rey have her vision of Kylo? Did I miss it? And was the vision of her and Kylo working together or was it of Kylo turning to the Light?

 

Their touching hands is only made possible by the force. She saw Ben's future through the force. Luke didn't see anything beyond the darkness.

She explained to Luke as much was why she had to go to him.

 

But this is the reason given to explain why she went to the Supremacy. She thought if she went, he would turn. But that doesn’t really explain why she wouldn’t kill him after he decided to reject yet another offer of redemption. Why would she think it’s still her destiny to redeem after that?

Point is the movie doesn’t offer an explanation for why she left him alive and I still feel like that was something important that should have been dealt with.

 

Actually Padme was not sheltered in comparison to Rey. Padme actually understood many things that were going on. It was more a question of experience. Padme and Rey are similar in nature but with Padme it makes sense whereas with Rey it just it without support or reason (which is her entire underlying problem as a character).

Just to add as ever I find Padme terrific in ROTS and she makes brave and in-character decisions that sense for her as a person (she is not perfect). Which is the problem with Rey in relation as Padme wanting to see the truth of her husband and then becoming desperate makes complete sense while Rey's decisions are so nonsensical and only based on her utter arrogance that the decidedly long time evil Ren can turn because she says so due to her seeing a vision in the Force (that she really only discovered that she was connected to hours earlier when TFA started.)

One person is trying to help her husband who she first met 13 years earlier and has proven to be a hero while the other is trying to do something that she's been outright told is a bad idea, won't work and for someone who she's only known for hours and does nothing but kill or want to kill her friends.

But she knows better. Again why didn't anyone reading the script by RJ think that this made any sense and was good for her character?

 

tbh I think people need to stop superimposing what Luke goes through in the OT onto Rey and using that as a judgement for what constitutes a quality character arc. Her explicitly failing along the same lines Luke does in Empire isn't THE litmus test and I think often these discussions get so technical that they completely miss the point of what the writers are trying to do with Rey, which surprise, isn't the same as with Luke.

(Yes, I understand there is some value in making the comparison for the sake of pointing out why you may not have found Rey's arc as satisfying as Luke's, but I think this endless back and forth degenerates the discussion often in this thread).

Yes. I think Rey is actually a strong character in TLJ the more I think about it, but her going from the Supremacy to being on the Falcon was just a bad jump. The revelation about her parents was IMO a great climax for the character for what she had been going through since TFA, and the rocks effectively showed her embracing her status as a "hero", but the movie completely just skips any exploration of how these events and revelations impact HER.

I should also add that a scene where Rey contemplates killing Kylo would have been extremely interesting and effective because it places Rey in the exact same position Luke was the night Kylo fell. Such a moment would have done a lot to round out both Rey's character arc and the Rey-Luke dynamic. I hope JJ revisits this moment in a FG scene in IX - maybe Luke can ask Rey why she couldn't kill him.

 

Daisy won Best Actress at the Empire Awards.