On Kirk said:
Which Kirk? The one who enters Trek with decades of experience and has to rely on his ship, crew and wits to save the day while dealing with his own character flaws? Or the one who is a layabout who spends the film having to grow up in the face of a massive threat, and then must rely on his ship and crew while accepting his flaws?
The one who flew around the galaxy banging dozens of alien ladies in between saving the universe and winning fistfights with lizard-men and genetically engineered ubermenschen. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_c1Odol9xw]
On Neo said:
Does that matter in the scope of the film? It's about him living up to the expectations thrust upon him and adapting to having his whole world ripped from under him. This leads to the final act where he has to fight his way up through a building to rescue his mentor (thinking he's just another guy too) and is only able to make it through direct help, the memetic slowdown limbo shot ends with him still being hit and at the Agent's mercy.
If you stopped the film at his memetic slowdown limbo shot, you might have a point. But immediately after that, Neo is confronted by Agent Smith, fights him to a standstill,
kills him with a train, and only after Smith respawns into another passer-by does Neo get cornered and killed...before rising from the dead with the power of love, stopping bullets with his mind, beating Smith one-handed, then jumping into his chest and making him explode into green chunks. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vy7RaQUmOzE]
The man is literally called the Chosen One. Practically his entire character in the movie is that he's inexplicably powerful for no immediately apparent reason other than to serve as a metaphor for Jesus.
On Walter White said:
He's a middle-aged chemistry teacher whose pushed to deal meth because of his impending illness and wanting to leave something for his family.
And if you watch the first season, he's not at all good at crime, the events of the season are about him trying to cope with his illness, and trying to find a way to make money with the one thing he's good at. Now I'm only halfway through the third season, but so far the shows largely been about how he becomes the drug lord and slips further away from his original self.
I know that Walter White is deliberately written as a fallible and flawed character - the show is intended as an anti-heroic tragedy, rather than wish fulfillment, and it's a
good show, so it's done well - but he's still a high school chemistry teacher who segues comfortably into the role of criminal mastermind. He is very obviously an exceptional character; better at chemistry than most chemists and better at dealing drugs than most drug dealers.
With the knowledge and training of a high school chemistry teacher, he starts manufacturing meth so pure that the cops are left speechless, as well as multiple improvised bombs and poisons that all seem to work a lot better than they really should. Guy makes thermite out of Etch-a-Sketches. I mean, seriously.
On John McClane said:
Excatly!
He's not a superhero, or Batman or a Jedi. McClane is just a cop who goes to LA for Christmas to see his family. He's then plunged into a subversion of an action movie plot and has to stay alive, he had no intention of stopping them. The first thing he does once Gruber makes his play is to run away and
call the police.
His situation is summed up in one exchange:
"Sir, this is a line reserved for emergencies."
"No fucking shit lady do I sound like I'm trying to order a pizza!?"
That last line with Willis' delivery tells you everything about how scared he is and how he knows he stands no chance in a direct fight, remember by this point he only killed the first mook by luck and largely spends the second act of the film trying to get the proper authorities in, only stepping in to be what little of an annoyance to Gruber he can. The setup for the last act is him pulling glass out of his feet while he tries to keep focused on getting Holly and the hostages out while being scared out of his mind.
Yeah, John McClane is just an average everydude caught in an exceptional situation. Except he takes out twelve terrorists pretty much on his first try, in a situation where 99.9% of average everydudes would just get caught and shot to death. And then in the subsequent films, he outsmarts and defeats a US special forces colonel, another terrorist mastermind, a
cyberterrorist mastermind, and some KGB-type ************ in the fifth film that I never saw.
Point is, John McClane's appeal comes from how he
appears to be an average everydude who is relatable and shit, and therefore creates the illusion in the audience's mind that they - the average everydude - could, in McClane's situation, pull off the same shit McClane does. When in reality, if you were trapped barefoot in an office building on Christmas with a squad of homicidal terrorist/thieves, you'd either surrender, hide and curl into a ball, or try to stop them and get shot fifty times in the face because they have submachine guns and you have bare feet.
Ninjamedic said:
All of these characters in some way have earned the victories they get, but Rey largely gets handed them on a plate. She can fight, fend for herself, fly a ship, fix a ship, ballroom dance and much much more! When the force is introduced to her, she is almost immediately able to do what only Obi-Wan could do in the original film and is on par with Luke at the opening of Jedi. The film tells us she is the underdog, but the film shows us that everything she has to deal with is a minor annoyance at best, and so her journey is a farce. It's emblematic of modern blockbusters I find.
Well, shit, dude. How badly did Luke Skywalker have to work in order to earn this shit? [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iH6a1iYQ0GA]
Yes, some films force their protagonists to work to earn their victories. But as a general rule, Star Wars is not that type of film. Star Wars is the type of film where the heroes are good at what they do because they are the heroes.
And that's not a bad thing! Not
inherently. Y'know, it works for Star Wars. My point earlier - which I think you actually missed - was that the real reason Kirk is a great starship captain and Neo is a great punch-fightster is because if they were
bad at their jobs, they'd be boring to watch. No-one is super keen to watch a middlingly-competent starship captain muddle his way through tense diplomatic and military standoffs. No-one wants to see Neo face down an Agent and then get beaten to death as everyone else has before him.
Basically: these characters are not the protagonists because they are exceptionally skilled. They are exceptionally skilled
because they are the protagonists. They were deliberately written that way in order to make them interesting to an audience.
