Well, Luke was great at flying sophisticated, cutting edge military hardware all because he had a souped up T-16 hot rod back home. So... yeah. The narratives are very similar yet it’s Luke who gets the pass but not Rey. Too right we know why...
Well, it seems Luke was already trained as a Pilot when we met him. I figure in Star Wars it might be almost as common as a driver's license, though.
I think one of the big differences is that Luke that when Luke uses the Force or the Light Saber, he seems to be actually struggling. Luke's first attempt at force-grabbing his light saber fails. When he trains with Yoda, he fails to lift the X-Wing up, and gets his concentration broken during other tasks and drops everything he's levitating.
When he first has a real light saber fight... He's not horrible at it, but clearly outmatched by Vader, who easily swings his light saber and utilizes the force to overwhelm him. But Vader at this point doesn't even want to kill him. And Luke still loses a hand...
His second fight against Vader doesn't go well at first - only once he taps in to the Dark Side does he start overwhelming Vader, which obviously plays more into the theme that the Dark Side is a seductive short cut, and doesn't mean he suddenly is more skillful.
Rey so far somehow lacked scenes where she really had to struggle hard and outright lose. And that is what is creating the impression that she's basically overpowered or a Mary Sue. Her first fight with Kylo Ren seems to go a bit too easy for her - even though that might just because he's wounder. But it still leads to the feeling that she never haves a hard time and a great challenge she has to overcome. That makes her less ... exciting.
Not to derail the current conversation but, if this trilogy is to wipe the slate clean (or more generously complete) the Skywalker saga presumably because Skywalkers are uber powerful with the force, then isn’t that to a degree derailed if Rey is stronger with the force than Luke? And so equal to the strongest Skywalker (Ben). Having written that down I can see that I’ve made a couple of assumptions that might not be true
I think one of the challenges that I have with where Star Wars is heading is that the “Episodes” are intrinsically linked with the Skywalker family. But that may just mean that there are just not going to be any more Episodes in the future ...
Will Daisy Ridley also be available for movies after the first trilogy? Because it will be kinda awkward to not have her available when she is the new Jedi Star at the horizon. Unless she dies in the last part?
I am not sure if it was Abrams or Johnson that really made Rey another "special chosen with even more exceptional Jedi powers than who came before". But it seems it could become a bit ridiculous if they don't get rid of this concept. Otherwise it will be turtles all the way down, and chosen of the force all the way up.
A reason why I would have thought that just going with Luke successfully establishing a new, young Jedi Order between RotJ and TFA would have been better. No need for super-Jedi, just regular ones, but they are still much rarer than in the old Republic, so we can focus on the journey of a newly discovered Force Sensitive (and I very much like the idea of a female Jedi) on his way to become a Jedi, that might be getting in over his head at first but manages to save the day and find his path.
