First Look At Star Wars: The Last Jedi Deleted Scenes Reveal Luke In Mourning

Even if you've already watched Star Wars: The Last Jedi three times and know all of Luke's lines by heart, there's still plenty more to see.

The upcoming Blu-ray and digital release of Rian Johnson's divisive blockbuster will feature 14 deleted scenes, and Entertainment Weekly has details about several of them. Some of the scenes are just kind of fun, but others add a new dimension to some of the characters and their storylines.

"I love each one of the scenes individually," Johnson said. "I mean, every single one of them was not cut because it didn't work. It was cut because the movie as a whole was better without it. So with each one of them, it's that strange combination where it feels awful to cut it, but it feels good to cut it, because suddenly the pacing of a section of the movie feels much better, or suddenly the film is cleaner, or clearer, in many different ways."

In one of the deleted scenes, we see Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) impacted by the death of Han Solo in Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Luke, who has shut himself off from the Force, does realize that Solo is killed, then he goes to sit quietly in his stone hut. As his eyes well up with tears, the film cuts to Leia Organa (Carrie Fisher), who is far, far away on the Resistance starship Raddus. She's in a similar pose to Luke, and the cut implies that the siblings are sharing a moment of grief.

"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 said. "It was a really lovely moment."

It also would've given the director a way to move the action back to the Raddus, but Johnson said he decided it would be better to remain on the island with Luke and Rey (Daisy Ridley).

"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."

In another deleted scene, Luke puts Rey to a test in her Jedi training. It happens when Rey looks at the shoreline of Ahch-To and sees a line of lights arriving by sea. They're headed for the small village that's home to the Caretakers, the amphibious alien "nuns" who take care of the ancient Jedi structures. 

Luke tells Rey the lights are a warring tribe that are here to raid the village, and he watches without doing anything about it. Meanwhile, Rey is ready to grab her lightsaber and stop the invasion, but Luke warns that their interference could just make things worse. Still, Rey runs down the mountain and fires up her lightsaber. This shot was in the trailer, but removed from the final film. 

Although this might sound a lot like that mysterious "third lesson" that Luke never got to teach her, Johnson said it isn't. "Originally it was just a breaking point for her," he said. "This is the point where she finally says, 'Okay, if you're not gonna help, then I've wasted too much time here."

The original idea was to drive a wedge between Luke and Rey that would drive her to connect with Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) in their Force vision conversations. 

"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 said. "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."

But removing the scene made it even more painful for Luke when he learns that Rey is contacting his nephew and former student. 

"It's much more of a crushing reversal when Luke finds her in the hut [talking to Kylo,]" Johnson said. "You get the sense that she and Luke were actually making progress, as opposed to, 'Oh, things were screwed up.'"

In another deleted scene, Finn (John Boyega) is thinking of leaving the Resistance. But that's when BB-8 rolls to him and plays a hologram of Rey saying a heartfelt goodbye to Finn when he was unconscious after being wounded by Kylo Ren in The Force Awakens. Johnson said the scene was just a way to remind everyone that Rey and Finn are close, since they're separated throughout most of The Last Jedi.

"I was looking for any opportunity I could to emotionally connect those two," he said. "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."

Prepare your wallet for the home release of The Last Jedi. It'll be available to download in both HD and 4K Ultra HD on March 13, followed by the Blu-ray release on March 27.