ST If Luke was Rey in ANH Rewrite

Borrowed from IMDB.


*Luke is an expert survivalist living on his own in Tatooine. He isn't subservient to Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru. He loyally waits for a lost companion to return.

*Luke steals R2-D2 from a Tusken Raider on a Bantha who has captured R2-D2. The Tusken just watches and rides away.

*Luke can understand everything R2-D2 says. C-3PO is written out since he's not needed to translate.

*R2-D2 follows Luke around obediently instead of running away and generally just thinks Luke's awesome.

*Luke meets Obi-Wan and tells him he's just a nobody and didn't even know the Force was real. Obi-Wan hands Luke his father's saber and then disappears from the movie. No training required.

*Luke experiences a "vision" upon touching the saber for unexplained reasons. Magic lightsaber?

*Luke enters the Cantina and knocks down Ponda Baba and Dr. Evazan with a stick when they threaten him.

*Luke finds the Falcon with only Chewie inside as TIE Fighters start bombing the area. He jumps in and flies it with some wild maneuvers through Beggar's Canyon while Chewie works the gun port. They destroy the TIEs and return to get Han.

*Chewie is injured while running from Stormtroopers to get to the Falcon and Luke takes over as co-pilot.

*Luke fixes the Falcon's malfunctions by himself before Han can figure out what to do.

*Han is so impressed with Luke that by the time they get to the remains of Alderaan, he offers Luke a permanent job.

*They sneak into the back door of the Death Star unnoticed and somehow instantly find Leia's cell.

*Luke uses the Jedi Mind Trick on the guards at Leia's cell to get inside. (First time the Jedi Mind Trick appears in the movie.)

*Leia says Luke is amazing, thanks him and won't stop talking about wanting to run away with him and devote herself to helping him. Luke is not interested and says he just wants to be friends.

*Han somehow instantly finds the head Stormtrooper Commander and says he'll kill him if he doesn't shut down the tractor beam. The Stormtrooper Commander complies and they throw him in the trash compactor.

*Darth Vader finds the heroes. Luke watches as Han Solo confronts Darth Vader and is killed.

*Luke attacks Darth Vader and holds his own. He drops his saber but he is able to Force grab it before Vader can. (First time Force grab is seen in the movie.) Vader offers to train Luke. Luke lands several blows on Vader and cuts off his hand while remaining unscathed and Vader collapses in a heap. But there is an explosion that ruptures the platform between them and Luke must join Leia, Chewie and R2 back on the Falcon.

*Meanwhile, Wedge leads a small squad to do a bombing run on the Death Star. He easily hits the target without facing much resistance or even thinking about it much and the Death Star blows up.

*Luke officially joins the Rebellion at the end of the movie and is instantly selected to pilot a ship on a vital mission they've been waiting years to do. Their best pilot who just blew up the Death Star, Wedge, is passed over.

 

It's so exaggerated, I honestly wonder if Rey's sudden resurgence in the duel is JJ's way of laughing at us.

Think about it: Ren tells her she needs a wise teacher. To show her the lore and secrets of the past.

Rey closes her eyes, whispers, "Force..." and nearly kills him.

Is this JJ's postmodern way of telling us what he thinks of us? With Ren as the "Lt. Barclay" or "Superboy Prime" who stands in for fans so they can be humiliated in effigy? He idolizes Star Wars' past — Vader, Luke, and the things we're nostalgic for are an obsession with him, right down to the memorabilia and costume. It's explicitly pointed out that Rey is ignorant of all that history, aside from the Rebel helmet she wears.

And when he tries to convert her to his way of thinking — the value of past lore — she closes her eyes, whispers, "Force..." and nearly kills him.

Should I feel insulted here?

 

No. You should, however, feel insufferable.

 

I think the sequels will make sense of this.... Hopefully.

 

She knows about Han. She knows about the Falcon and even the Kessel run (though she gets the parsec number wrong). She knows about Luke's achievements. And when she meets Han she if full of awe. I think she adores Luke and Han as much as Kylo Ren adores Vader.

 

She's heard stories. She doesn't know or care the way Ren obviously does.

 

What makes you think that?

 

You know that bit where Maz tells Rey that the Force is all around her and she needs to let it in?

Yeah, that's kind of precisely what she does in the climax. The only people who are saying that Rey's acceptance of the Force wasn't set up weren't paying attention.

 

Keep fighting the good fight. The utter ridiculousness on display in this scene is beyond me.

 

Well c'mon, Ren has Vader's burned-up mask! And talks to it! He's the son of Han and Leia, and the student of Luke!

Meanwhile, Rey doesn't even know if the Jedi are real.

I think it's fair to say Ren probably gets a little better grades in history class, don't you think?

 

Ren is definitely a Vader fanboy. But not so much a Luke, Han, Leia fanboy.
Rey seems to be a Han fanboy at least, probably also a Luke fanboy, not just because she knows stories but because of her reaction to realizing she has just met Han Solo and is on board of the Millenium Falcon or that Luke isn't just a myth like she thought. She seems to be in awe.

And yes, Ren knows about the OT stuff whereas Rey just read/heard about it. That doesn't mean that she isn't into Han/Luke as much as Ren is into Vader or at least close.

 

Oh boy. *grabs popcorn*

 

Man it is amazing how some many people are butt hurt over a strong female lead.

 

It's also amazing how many people are just intellectually lazy. Or actually, it's sad.

 

Intellectually lazy? How so. Indulge me.

 

I want to like her. In some ways, I do like her. I think Daisy Ridley did a great job of taking a part that was written to be obnoxiously perfect and making her appealing and likable. For so long the Force has been wrapped up in such dark, heavy themes of guilt and regret and wrongness. So much talk about how maybe the galaxy would be better off without Force wielders and Luke should let the Order die. No, I want the Force to be an unambiguously good thing. I want having the Force to be better than not having the Force, and a galaxy with the Jedi to be unambiguously better than a galaxy without the Jedi. I love that we have a main character who connects the Force to a more positive attitude instead of this endless, sorrowful burden. Ridley does a great job of turning the Force storyline more toward where I would want it to go.

But man oh man... when you list off her abilities... what is she?

 

The OP is literally nothing more than a pointless transposition of out of context incidents and occurrences that worked fine in TFA. Unless people are seriously suggesting that there is a real problem with such things as, er, Rey fighting off BB-8's captor before meeting him. If THAT is used as an example of Rey's alleged overpoweredness, then I'm glad this thread exists, as it illustrates perfectly that anything more than being a helpless woman waiting to be rescued is too much for some people.

This thread is not going anywhere good, and probably any points about over poweredness should be made in the Rey thread

 

If you try to shut down an argument with "You are a sexist, racist, etc." without arguing the actual points then you are lazy.

 

She's a hardened survivor who is skilled in staff combat... and also happens to be strong in the Force?

Which is her character in a nutshell if you're being reductive. Every one of her non-Force related competencies is easily explained by her background, and everything else is explained by the Force.

Hell, Luke is even worse. He's a farmboy, but he also has the time and funds to go joyriding in an airspeeder to cull the local large mammals? How does that make sense?

 

How about Anakin the SLAVE with a stay home mom and the funds and education to build a droid and a pod racer.

 

The main point is that Rey learns more skills in her first movie than Anakin and Luke combined (in their first movies). It's all explained for Rey, it's not unbelieveable, but she simply is the fastest achiever by a long shot.

 

Anakin, despite being an eight year old slave, is able to, with no training;

Build pod racers
Race pod racers - is the only human in the galaxy able to do so
See things before they happen (according to his mother)
Articulate the will of the force, to some degree (telling qui gon why he has come to Tattooine)
Either; use his mind to analyse data on a data pad on an electrical level, OR see a datapad from somewhere other than his actual location, OR read the mind of a Jedi Master, in order to guess the image being shown during his initial test
Pilot a starship without ever having been in one before
While in the starship, through inherent force sensitivity manage to bypass shields and destroy a droid control ship, something the rest of the naboo fleet were unable to do

Now, I'm not at all saying that that makes Anakin's actions unrealistic, nor am I saying that that is something that all Jedi can do.
What I am saying though is that this is a clear precedent for a character much younger and much less self sufficient than Rey having powers that are even more impressive. But the noise around Rey is much louder.

 

clinteastwoodbradfield Be fair. There have been plenty of threads about "Where did Anakin get the pod?" "Why was it Anakin who took out the droid ship?" "How can Anakin already do X?" No one ignored that those things were a lot for a kid his age to do.

 

You're misunderstanding me. For what it's worth, I disagree that there was anything like the outcry over Anakin's skills, but that's not the point. The point is that there is a clear, strong precedent in young Anakin for a force user to have great power and inherent ability in very specific ways with no training at all. Regardless of whether there was a debate about that 16 years ago, it is now firmly established in canon that Jedi ability can manifest in that way, so within the setting of the saga, there's absolutely no reason to think of Rey's ability as inconsistent with what we've been shown in previous films.

Unless you can tell me how apparently it's more difficult to get a weak minded storm trooper to release you, than to read the minds of Jedi masters/see what is on a screen from afar

 

And that is the question people should be asking. I feel that Rey doing these things in the film is trying to invoke those questions. Why is she able to do this? Instead of the snobby she shouldn't be able to do that. To me there are not plot holes, but clues.

I think it is fairly obvious that she was being trained by Luke Skywalker, and that most likely Kylo Ren spared her during the massacre and left her on Jakku. That she is either repressing the memory herself or had her memory wiped somehow. If that proves to be the case, is it so crazy that as she starts interacting again for the first time with the force and a force user that some of her dormant training awakens.

Heck the name of the film alone implies some form of previous training. You go into a dormant state and then you awaken from it. It's not a birth or discovery, it's an awakening.