Star Wars: The Last Jedi is a long-ass film. With a cinematic release clocking in at two hours and thirty-three minutes, director Rian Johnson was able to deliver a lot of fanboy-frustrating goodness, but new details about the movie’s deleted scenes reveals an extra twenty minutes of footage was left on the cutting room floor.
According to Slashfilm, one of the canned sequences involved Rey (Daisy Ridley), a grizzled Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill), and those preposterously put-upon nun creatures populating Ach-To.
During Rey’s persistent campaign to enlist Skywalker to the Resistance, the Jedi master points to some fires in the distance. He tells the young fighter it’s a sign raiding parties have returned to the island, and are hell-bent on ransacking the joint – and killing those precious, habit-wearing amphibians.
Luke explains that if Rey intervenes, the raiding party will only come back stronger; he muses that it’d be better for a Jedi to let the scenario play out, on account of ‘balance.’
She ignores that take entirely. In her do-goody fury, Rey charges over in a Force-powered sprint – except, when she arrives, she discovers it’s not a raiding party, but a regular party, and those dugong nuns are having a grand old time. Also, Chewbacca is there, and R2D2 is wearing a festive necklace.
Old man Skywalker hurries over, explaining to Rey that her desire to, ya know, do something, is more important to the Resistance than his presence. He says he tricked her to teach her a lesson, and that she passed. Understandably, she’s pissed, and calls him out for being a bit of a dick.
And that’s apparently the reason the scene was cut – Luke appeared like too much of a dick. In a movie which has already been derided in some corners for too perfectly shattering the myth of the infallible Luke Skywalker, that test was seen as too much.
Slashfilm also details a Tom Hardy cameo that was tragically left out of the final cut. The scene takes place as Finn (John Boyega), Rose (Kelly Marie Tran) and BB-8 sneak through Snoke’s (Andy Serkis’) ship. Hardy, in full Stormtrooper get-up, eyes Finn in his First Order disguise. There’s a moment of tension, before the foot soldier reveals he knew Finn before his desertion.
“I know who you are…. FN 2187! Damn boy, I never took you for officer material!” Hardy says, reportedly in a hefty Southern drawl.
And to think we were robbed of yet another instance of Tom Hardy stealing a scene while wearing a mask.
There are plenty more elements you can expect to see in the film’s home cinema release, and you can check ’em out HERE.
