Let me guess, the scene from the trailer with Maz handing the lightsaber to Leia isn’t in the deleted scenes, is it?
Look, I love this movie so much, and I don’t hate JJ, but he made some weird decisions re Leia. I kind of think the Powers That Be don’t understand what people like about Leia as a character or her relationship with Han. Could it be as simple as that? We don’t want to see them separated and unhappy. We aren’t crazy about them being canonically absentee parents, to the point that their child up and joined a cult because of his abandonment issues.
Is it simplistic to say that maybe, in trying to make the movie more feminist and pay tribute to Leia’s girl-power popcultural legacy, they decided to give Han and Luke weirdly negative, cowardly roles–one runs away from his marriage, one runs away from mankind–to make Leia look stronger by comparison? Were they perhaps surprised to learn that fans were somewhat confused and disappointed to see their childhood heroes depicted this way? We already knew Leia was powerful, strong, and tough in the face of tragedy because it was depicted in the original movies. In fact, we wanted to see those emotions explored further, wanted to see Leia get a tiny bit more screen time. We didn’t have to put down two objectively Good Men, Han and Luke, to make Leia look resilient. The movie does such a fantastic job of making Rey well-drawn and complex without putting down Poe (a literal superhero) and Finn (who is not as technically skilled as Rey but holds his own in a fight and has an innate bravery and morality and is also very funny and loyal).
These concerns are more script-based than director-based, but here are some things that JJ could have done to mitigate these heavy, controversial character choices:
include the several Leia scenes he cut, such as the one where she, you know, leads an army and talks to her soldiers (this one is actually in the deleted scenes);
or, perhaps, the scene from the trailer where she holds her brother’s old lightsaber (her FATHER’s old lightsaber!!!)–the one that cut off Luke’s hand, which SHE literally had to tourniquet off right after it happened (think about it–that memory would be burned into her brain), while using the Force for the first time, while ALSO flying a spaceship under fire to rescue said brother, AND the last thing we heard in ROTJ was a promise that Leia would become even more powerful than Luke in the Force,
and MAYBE it would have been nice to get ONE HINT of any of that by allowing ten seconds of Carrie Fisher holding a lightsaber prop into a movie that runs approx 2 hrs 45 mins
Also: let Harrison and Carrie have a few more beats of that smiling, nostalgic chemistry they have in the behind the scenes videos. Make a joke about Luke or mention a happy memory of Ben, let them KISS (they literally did it just for fun at Comic Con or wherever), give them a subtle little twist on the I love you/I know line (“I missed you”/“I know,” “I still….”/“I know.” The possibilities were endless, you guys).
Give Kylo ONE second of reaction to any mention of his mother (Han literally could have said, “Your mother misses you” instead of “We miss you” and Kylo could have flinched, and that would have been more effective than ten scenes of exposition). This will probably be explored in later episodes, but I just wanted a HINT of it. Just a flash of anger or sadness in Kylo’s eyes for Leia.
Have someone tell Rey and/or Finn a cool story about Leia, because they both flip out about Han’s awesome reputation, and Rey practically does a cartwheel out of sheer joy when she hears Luke Skywalker’s name, but no one mentions Leia until they meet her on screen (Han mentions her to Maz and neither Finn nor Rey show any sign of recognition), and although Finn speaks to her with respect and Rey falls weeping into her arms, it might have been nice to have either of them–especially the 19-year-old female lead–be in AWE of the senator/princess/general who is still running the Galaxy thirty years after she saved it, who is singlehandedly trying to track down her missing bro The Last Jedi because she’s sorry he’s upset but yet again he is Her Only Hope, and who STILL has time to braid her hair into complicated hairdos that probably take her at least a half-hour every morning and she’s already a busy woman but she makes the time for it.
Okay, this got a little bit out of control, and I didn’t realize I felt quite so strongly about this until I started wondering where that deleted scene went, but the above still stands. A lot of this will hopefully be explored in eps 8 & 9, but that doesn’t undo the missed opportunities in TFA.
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