With plenty to already argue about in “Star Wars: The Last Jedi,” the “extensive” deleted scenes that are expected to arrive with the home video release will only give fans more to talk about. However, there’s one thing you won’t be seeing visualized except in your own head — Han Solo’s funeral.
The death of everyone’s favorite smuggler was one of the most surprising and emotionally intense moments of “Star Wars: The Force Awakens.” Honoring the character in ‘The Last Jedi’ is likely a path that many filmmakers would’ve chosen to go down, but director Rian Johnson explains why he ultimately decided it wasn’t necessary for his picture.
“[There was no debate of showing Han Solo’s funeral], just because pacing-wise it didn’t have a place. It’s tough in ‘Star Wars’ because I always think about the mourning that Luke gives to Ben’s death, which is all of four-and-a-half seconds before, ‘Come on kid we’re not out of this yet’ and then boom, you’re into ‘Yay, woo-hoo! Don’t get cocky!’ There’s the moment for it, but it’s not long,” he told Collider. “We don’t have time for our sorrows, commanders. That’s kind of the thing of ‘Star Wars’; you don’t really linger on grief because you’re moving forward.”
It’s an interesting observation, and Johnson stresses that in his already story-filled ‘The Last Jedi,’ there wasn’t a natural place to squeeze in mourning for Han.
“It was never something where there was an organic place for it like, ‘Oh it would go here.’ It was always something like, ‘We wanna get this right up on our feet and going from the start,’ ” he added.
The good news is the upcoming official “Star Wars: The Last Jedi” novelization by Jason Fry will have the funeral sequence that didn’t make the big screen. And yep, it’s canon. The book hits shelves on March 6th.
Without a body, wouldn’t it be a memorial event rather than a funeral? In Han’s case, might he not have wanted something more akin to a wake (if he would have wanted anything, considering his earlier stand on religions)?
I’m no writer or moviemaker, but I can think of many ways a memorial for Han could have been put into the story, which could have even set the whole story into motion.
Hell, the picture could have opened on Han’s memorial at the rebel base, with Leia and gang lamenting his death. In the midst of the ceremony, explosions suddenly roar in the distance- the First Order have somehow discovered the location of the secret Resistwnce base and have begun their attack. We then pick up right where TLJ starts.
How easy was that?
This approach would have been way more logical than “the First Order are magically right on the Resistance’s tail directly after their Starkiller Base was destroyed.” We would get the impression that, while not a whole lot of time has passed, the First Order were able to regroup after a huge defeat and gather their remaining forces to hunt down the Resistance. It just didn’t play out logically in the actual movie.
Rian Johnson is such a hack.