This month sees the home release of “The Last Jedi,” which we know is going to be packed with special features, including fourteen deleted scenes! Well today Entertainment Weekly has revealed the details on five of those fourteen deleted scenes that we’re going to see when “The Last Jedi” hits home, including some new images from them.
Here are those details and some images from those five deleted scenes revealed by Entertainment Weekly below, including some words about them from director Rian Johnson.
First up is a scene that takes place when Finn is contemplating on leaving the resistance to find Rey, but then BB-8 rolls up to show him a recording of Rey’s goodbye to him while he was still unconscious at the end of “The Force Awakens.”
“I was looking for any opportunity I could to emotionally connect those two,” the director says. “I thought it was a really sweet little scene. I loved John Boyega’s performance in it. Ultimately it was meant to explain his motivation for going [to find Rey and quit the Resistance], but we realized that you understood his motivation, because he tells it to Rose. Once we realized we could get away without it, it was something that just naturally fell away.”
2. Rey and the Raiders of the Caretaker Village
This is the scene we’ve heard about before, where Luke tells Rey about the Caretaker village being under siege from raiders, but ends up being another lesson Luke is trying to teach her, saying if she goes to help the caretakers and drive the raiders away, they would just come back with more numbers, and would she still be here to help them next time?
“Originally it was just a breaking point for her. Okay, he’s gone too far,” Johnson says. “This is the point where she finally says, ‘Okay, if you’re not gonna help, then I’ve wasted too much time here.”
“In her next-to-last Force connection she has with Kylo, which is the very intense one, the context for that was her coming off this rejection and angry moment with Luke,” Johnson says. “When we take that segment out, suddenly she’s coming into that Force connection after leaving things in a hopeful place with Luke, at the end of the temple lesson.”
Out of all the deleted scenes revealed so far, this is one I really wished was still in the movie. We get to see more of Luke’s emotional reaction to learning about Han’s death, as he goes back to his hut, shedding tears over the loss of his friend. It was also revealed that the scene would have cut to Leia in a similar position to Luke, showing that they were both connected in sharing this moment of grief over the loss of Han.
“It’s both of them having the connection, and that also then led you to think that Leia was thinking about Han’s death,” Johnson says. “It was a really lovely moment.”
“We realized just for pacing in that section we had to stick with Rey and Luke, and we wanted just to go straight from him slamming the door of the hut into the day-in-the-life montage, of him going around the island. Taking that bit out suddenly propelled us forward into that segment in a way that just felt much better for the film.”
This sequence is another deleted scene we’ve heard Rian Johnson talk about before, where there was more with Finn, Rose, DJ and BB-8 aboard the Supremacy. The one revealed here is where they run into a Stormtrooper that recognizes Finn, and Finn discovers that the First Order has covered up is defection, as the Stormtrooper just laughs at him when he sees he has been promoted to an officer.
“The implication from the exchange is that this was obviously an embarrassment that this happened with Finn, and that First Order didn’t let the info get out, as much as they could,” Johnson says. “The tension is broken by the fact that he doesn’t really know the story of what happened with Finn.”
The final deleted scene revealed today by Entertainment Weekly is one I found very interesting, as the end to Finn and Phasma’s fight was going to end much differently. In the original version, Finn was going to call out Phasma for her part in lowering the shields on Starkiller Base, with all of her troopers standing there to hear it. The stormtroopers know that it’s probably not a good idea for them to hear that bit of information, and they were right, as Phasma shoots everyone of them before they could react. Her and Finn then finish up their fight, with Phasma then getting hit by a blaster herself, and then hurled into the flames like we saw in the film.
I really like the little moment of Phasma being caught and getting called out by John, and that little game of chess that they have,” Johnson says. “But we needed a much more condensed version of that scene, where essentially it’s the same outcome.”
All of these deleted scenes sound very cool, and can’t wait to actually see them along with the other nine. While not all of these five are scenes I think should have definitely been including in the film, the one I did think would have been great to see is the Luke in mourning sequence, as I did wish we got to see more of Luke’s reaction to Han’s death in the actual film, and it sounded great as it was described here.
Be sure to head on over to Entertainment Weekly for more images and information from Rian Johnson on these five deleted scenes.
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