The more people try to defend Rey's absurd proficiency with the Force and lighsabers as not being too far fetched and within the scope of her abilities for whatever reason, the more I actually dislike those aspects of the film and her character.
Kylo Ren is a powerful Force user who has been training at it and swordsmanship presumably for most of his life. It makes no sense whatsoever that Rey got the better of him during the interrogation exchange. I would have understood and actually liked it if she got a shot in after he extracted what he wanted and that startled him. For her to actually turn it all on him though, I don't think that should have happened. It made Kylo Ren look like a joke and sucked tension out of his subsequent scenes because he was prematurely neutered.
The sword fight at the end you could mitigate to some extent because he was shot and in pain and that clearly affected his stamina, but those should have been the reasons he lost instead of Rey pausing the game, taping into the Force just because he mentioned she needed to be taught how to use it and then suddenly whooping his ass. What that scene needed was an Empire inspired Vader VS Luke but with Ren being significantly more hurt by the end of it but strong enough to end in a tactical retreat either by Rey and Finn or by him after Chewbacca showed up in the Falcon or because, you know, the whole base was blowing up.
I don't deny that her tapping into the force and all was kind of bullshit, but you can't pull this particular rug out from under Rey without pulling it out under Luke as well.
A New Hope: How much force training did Ben give him? Intercepting some toy drone blasts blindfolded. One training exercise that lasted a under a frikken minute. This was all that was needed to give him the ability to make a one in a million shot?
Empire Strikes Back: Granted, Luke got his ass beat, but at the same time, he did conspicuously well for a guy who had, what, a weeks training with Yoda. After this, he goes back to Yoda for more training....
Edit: My mistake. I said he had a couple weeks of training from Yoda. Actually, it couldn't have been more than a couple hours. To quote the cracked article: "So there's the famous sequence where Luke gets trained by Yoda on Yoda's shithole of a planet. To break up the sequence, the film cuts to the Millennium Falcon getting chased by the Empire to Lando's cloud city. When they arrive, they get captured, at which point Luke has finished his training. Well, that doesn't work. Were they chased for months? Or was Luke trained in an afternoon? Either we were spared some extended scenes on board the Millennium Falcon featuring starvation and debates about when they'd have to eat Chewbacca, or becoming a Jedi is easier than getting a cub scout merit badge."
Return of the Jedi: just for him to die after telling him that he has to confront Darth Vader to become a Jedi knight. Apparently, the reason he wasn't ready to fight Vader in Empire is because he didn't know he had to fight Vader. From here, Luke is still not strong enough to defeat Vader...unless he's really really mad.
Yeah, you can argue that it's character stuff that determines strength in the force, but looking at it logically, Luke should be an utter noob, and his abilities are as BS as Rey's. Which is kind of why I feel the movie works. The flaws it has are the flaws that the originals suffer from. If you can ignore them in the originals, you can ignore them here.
And Phasma was the biggest disappointment. Did absolutely nothing the entire movie. I guess she will be back for the next movie and I hope they do something cool with her.
