Convenience and Coincidence

In the previous review, Finn and Rey were running from an apparently very understaffed First Order. They try to reach one particular ship, but two TIE-fighters blow it up, so the two run to another ship Rey had called garbage. This ship is the Millennium Falcon. I’m not going to comment on this yet because there are a number of things that happen at once, so I feel the best way to handle the situation is to describe the events and break them down one at a time.

Rey and Finn run to the Millennium Falcon. While running, Rey declared that she is a pilot, so Rey takes the cockpit and Finn takes the turret. As they are preparing, both Rey and Finn try to reassure themselves, muttering that they can “do this.”

The ship takes off before the TIE-fighters can ground the Falcon. Rey’s piloting skills start out rough, but before long she’s weaving through a downed star destroyer with ease. Finn manages to shoot down one of the TIE-fighters from the turret, but then the other fighter manages to jam Finn’s gun.

So, Rey pulls off one of the most impressive manoeuvres ever seen in Star Wars. She shuts off the Falcon’s engines, bringing it to a free fall, and positions the ship so that Finn’s locked gun can have a clear shot at the TIE-fighter. Finn takes advantage of the opportunity and downs the fighter, then Rey turns the engines back on, pulling the ship from free-fall before it can crash to the earth.

After this impressive feat, she and Finn meet up and begin congratulating each other. Then something explodes inside the Falcon, and steam begins pouring into the ship. Rey rushes to fix the Falcon and has Finn help her, while BB-8 and Finn discuss the fact that he is not with the resistance.

BB-8 is basically pressured into revealing the location of the Resistance to Rey. Then, something else happens. Somebody captures the ship. Rey and Finn hide beneath the floor grating. A door opens, and Han and Chewie step inside the Falcon.

 Okay, so let’s rewind. First of all, the Falcon is just sitting in a junkyard. That’s gigantic coincidence number one. This is incredibly unlikely by itself, and I’m not sure that even this could be justified with an explanation. But one major coincidence like this isn’t enough to collapse the movie, I guess, so let’s move on.

Then we have Rey and Finn’s escape. Finn’s actions make sense, since he is a storm trooper and has been shown to be a decent shot. But Rey’s piloting skills are, to put it bluntly, ridiculous. The movie tries to explain this by saying that Rey was a pilot, but there are multiple reasons why this doesn’t work.

Number One: Rey is not Luke Skylwalker. That is to say, a farm boy who is able to do what he wants in his free time. Rey is some kind of indentured servant. She’s been given to a man who uses her to salvage parts. Her story is closer to Anakin’s, not Luke’s, and during Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, Anakin was shown to be an excellent pilot as well, but his gift was only allowed to manifest through pod racing. And, even then, he had to build his own craft.

Furthermore, when Anakin does finally fly a ship, he’s shown to have some issues controlling the craft and is essentially guided into a battle. It isn’t until the end that he figures out how to turn the autopilot off and lands a fatal shot in the enemy’s main base. This leads us to reason Two.

While Rey does have some trouble with the Falcon at first, within a few minutes, she’s flying through a downed star destroyer, which is reminiscent of Lando’s run through the Death Star in episode six. Lando’s understood to be among the elite smuggling pilots who orbit Han Solo’s circle.

She goes from not knowing what she’s doing to pulling off a manoeuvre that was barely pulled off by one of the best pilots in the War against the Empire. Then the situation is made even more ridiculous when Rey shuts off the Falcon and does something Han Solo himself might not have been able to do. Rey says that the ship hasn’t flown in years, which means she’s never flown it before, so how is she doing this?

This is more than just Rey being too strong. These skills reflect a stakes problem. Such problems confuse an audience. Anakin was thought to be one of the better pilots in the saga, but when he was first flying an unfamiliar ship, his words were, “Let’s try spinning. That’s a neat trick.”

Contrast that with Rey, who expertly navigates through a ship’s ruined interior on the first try. And don’t forget that the Falcon is meant to be flown by two people, something Rey herself points out. So, how is she pulling off manoeuvres Han and Chewie probably wouldn’t be able to do in a craft that one person can’t fly efficiently? 

The Force by itself is not enough to offset experience because viewers have seen both Luke and Anakin have to account for their youth when it comes to piloting. The Force helps. The Force gives them inherent talent, but it doesn’t make the Force-sensitive characters instantly better than professional smugglers like Han and Lando. Therefore, when people watch Rey accomplish these tasks, the audience, many having watched the previous six films, are going to be wondering why she is so good, since the Force alone isn’t enough. This becomes yet another story question for the film. 

Abrams attempted to essentially give Rey superpowers in the name of fanservice, but he failed to realize that rules around the Force regarding piloting have already been well established for the prior six movies. This confused the audience. Instead of considering Rey super powerful, some of them assumed her skills were a mystery, a story question that needed to be answered. Therefore, they waited for those answers and never got them.

Then there’s Han and Chewie finding the Falcon. The chances of Rey and Finn just bumping into some main character on an entire planet are small enough, but the chances of Han and Chewie showing up at exactly this moment while Finn and Rey are in space are far too unlikely.

Han and Chewie could be anywhere in the galaxy, but they’re here, at this exact time. Why? The movie tries to explain this by stating that Han and Chewie found them on their scanners, but this only makes the situation worse because presumably, since the Empire already did this in A New Hope, the First Order would be scanning all the ships leaving the planet. So, how did Han and Chewie find the Falcon using scanners, but the First Order didn’t, especially when they were just chasing Finn and Rey inside a town?

This could’ve been easily offset by letting some time elapse. All the writers really needed to do was have Finn and Rey talk for a longer period of time while they fled the planet, a respite between intense scenes—this is sometimes called a sequel—that could double as character development.

The ffilm provides a little of this before the moment Han and Chewie arrive, and the dialogue is charming . . . mostly. But there needed to be more time spent here, or they should’ve broken the sequence up and placed another scene between the moment Finn and Rey escape and the moment Han and Chewie arrive.

Han and Chewie looking for the Falcon is fair enough, although the idea of Han “losing” the Falcon is absurd. Han says the Falcon was stolen, but Rey says the ship hasn’t flown in years, implying that Han and Chewie had been looking for just as long. I can’t see that happening. This is the ship that helped win the war. They would’ve made looking for it a priority.

Most of the coincidences and issues we’ve discussed took multiple viewings—as well as watching a few other reviews—to catch. But for me, this sequence was the moment I was pulled from the movie the first time I watched it. The coincidences here are huge and glaring, all these events happening inside a handful of minutes. It was too much too soon, and my brain flipped from immersion to critiquing. I’d lost my suspension of disbelief. We’ll cover what happens next in the following review.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdrErkGQPB0