re: Star Wars: TFA -Official Discussion Thread - Spoilers

I don't remember but oh well, it was minor.

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I didn't like how Flinn could hold off a trained jedi

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He didn't.

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Yes he did long enough to notice

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You couldn't tell Ren was just toying with him? Hell, he looked like a matador half the time. Just waving a cape and watching Finn run by him.

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Or, the more likely scenario, she was one the kids trained by Luke before Ren went rogue and started killing them all and in order to protect her, Luke stashed her away on Jakku and erased her memory. It also explains why she has no memory of anything prior to seeing the ship that dropped her off leaving Jakku. 

The island surrounded by an ocean isn't her imagination, it's a subconscious memory. 

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I think you're misunderstanding something.

Luke didn't go to the island where the first Jedi temple was until AFTER massacre, and Rey was on Jakku. I absolutely think she was being trained under Luke.

But the island is not a memory of that place. If it was, Kylo would have recognized it, and not called it imagination.




I fully believe Han and Leia knew who she was. But look at their angst regarding Kylo. Leia tells Han, obviously in regret "The second I sent Ben to train with Luke I lost him. I lost both of you." A woman who says that, does not leave her daughter on a random planet for over a decade, then hug her like an aunt, or like the kindly old woman your grandma plays bingo with every Tuesday.

I don't like how he was overwhelmed. She had no "real" weapons training. Just was better than most. Just because she used the force shouldn't have given her the edge to someone with actual lightsaber training and knows how to use the force.

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 might have been mistaken but I thought only people who can control the force use lightsabers. 

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They are the only ones who use them, but that's because everybody else would kill themselves. Anyone can turn them on. They made a show of Finn and Rey flicking the switch to turn it on.

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someone with actual lightsaber training and knows how to use the force.

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We don't know how much lightsaber training Ren actually received.

I can get behind the already trained by Luke deal and stuff was unlocking by fighting.

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I don't think Han knew who she was. Leia, probably.

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Too many cases of him talking to someone else about her offscreen, and the details not being revealed to the audience, for me to believe that he didn't know something about her.

The look on his face when landing at Maz's came across more as sympathy than guilt, but it was close.

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I didn't like how Flinn could hold off a trained jedi. I might have been mistaken but I thought only people who can control the force use lightsabers.

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The lightsaber is a light (as in energy, and as in weight) sword. Anyone can use it, a skilled martial artist or swordsman can do a lot of damage with it.

The Jedi are not extremely overpowered... go back to the prequels for a brief (painful) second. Young Anakin can run the Pod-race course because the Force gives him a few milliseconds of awareness into the future. It gives the impression that he has obscenely quick reflexes, because he is able to anticipate what is going to happen. That allows him and Luke to be gifted pilots too, and allowed him to jump from a ledge into traffic, and land on a speeder.

Applied this way, a fairly competent swordsman with this heightened anticipation, can win a sword fight by waiting until the opening or mistake occurs. He can usually survive the swordfight by anticipating the attacks, much as he can use the saber to block blaster shots (he puts the blade where the shot will be fired).
But this is just an advantage, it's not guaranteed. A Jedi might play chess against a chess master, see everything coming, and still lose, if he doesn't have enough skill to counter; same concept. He just will know he's losing more acutely than you or I would.
In a fight against a much better swordsman, he must be able to survive long enough to find the advantage, and not be pulled out of position and make his own mistake. Jedi lost to Grevious, because he was able to push that advantage until he broke through. Jango Fett was able to fire enough shots at the Jedi in the arena in Ep 2 to get past the saber, and kill him.

Without the Force, Finn (and other troopers) might have better combat training than Ren, it could be a close fight. Ren has more saber-specific training, but not against a grown man. He would just bob and weave until he gets his opening, and that's what happened.
Rey probably could take them both at the same time without the Force, if there is a sword or staff involved. She seemed to have the best skill and flow of all of them in that style of fighting, she's probably had to fight like that a lot to survive. Ren would have had a long fight to wait until she gave him an opening, he was injured and fatigued, and she then suddenly upped her game by "oh yeah, Use the Force". It leveled the field in terms of anticipation, and her superior physical skills were too much for him.

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Can someone explain the stormtroopers? I thought they were all clones. Why was there a female captain?

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Storm Troopers aren't clones, they are brainwashed draftees. Objectively, the cloners were impartial, in it for the money. They could be bought out by the highest bidder, and they could preprogram their clones (as evidenced by Order 66). That's fine for the first army, but in an extended conflict (this has been going on for decades now), there's a lot of risks. Your opponent can find and attack the cloners and cut off your supply of troops, or they could scrap together enough funds and sabatoge them (put in your own Order 66, so to speak). Or they simply could buy a batch of their own to combat yours. Too many loose ends to keep using them.

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Who is this new villan? He came out of nowhere

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He's the reason we have a new conflict and new movies. You can't really make a sequel with Luke, Han and Leia just hanging out on the beach, watching their kids play volleyball.