There were so many different rumors about Star Wars: The Force Awakens that it was just short of impossible to keep them all straight. Half of them contradicted the other half and then when the movie was finally released we learned that a great deal of them were just a bunch of crap. Well, now Luke Skywalker himself has informed us that one of the old rumors wasn’t entirely untrue. The original opening scene of The Force Awakens was going to include Luke’s old lightsaber.
During the production of Star Wars: The Force Awakens we actually heard several rumors regarding an opening sequence that would have involved Luke Skywalker’s lightsaber being found on the planet Jakku. In some versions of the story it’s discovered by a random inhabitant of the planet, in others, it’s picked by Rey and Finn. When the movie finally opened, and we did not see this happen, we just wrote it off as one of the rumors that was made up. However, Mark Hamill now tells The Sun, that’s not entirely the case.
In the original opening shot of 7, the first thing that came into frame was a hand with a lightsaber, a severed hand that enters the atmosphere, and the hand burns away and goes sticking into the surface of Jakku…and this alien hand comes in, don’t know if it was Maz, but it was an alien hand who takes the lightsaber away, and then the movie proceeds as you see it.
In the original rumors, Luke’s lightsaber seemed to play the role that the map eventually did, as the object everybody is chasing. It seems that the truth was more that the scene was meant to be a tease. Since it sounds like this scene was never actually created, it’s hard to know what it would have looked like. Would we have recognized the hand when we met Maz Kanata later, as the person in possession of the lightsaber, or would the weapon have traveled through multiple hands since we saw it at the beginning of the film?
If you think about it, though, this scene sounds really strange. Luke's hand is still grasping the lightsaber as it’s falling through space? How does that even happen? Has the hand been sailing through the void of space for 30 years until it’s grabbed by the gravity of Jakku? How does that work? What sort of messed up gravity must Bespin have for that to make sense? This scene might answer the question of how Maz Kanata got the lightsaber, but it asks so many more about how it got there in the first place.
