Almost a year and a half before Star Wars: The Force Awakens graced moviegoers with its presence in 2015, an allegedly confirmed report revealed details about the first 20 minutes of the movie. Chief among the report’s nuggets of information was a description of the film’s opening sequence. Aside from the traditional opening scrawl of text, the first thing audiences would see in the new Star Wars film wouldn’t be a planet, a ship or an interstellar canvas, but a severed hand clutching a lightsaber while floating through space. The hand was Luke Skywalker’s, which he lost in The Empire Strikes Back when his father, Darth Vader sliced it off. As amazing as the report seemed, it was dismissed by most as nothing more than unconfirmed rumors and tossed into the internet’s ever-growing trash bin.
Until today, when Luke himself, Mark Hamill sat down with the daily British newspaper The Sun for an exclusive Star Wars day interview. Among other things, the 64-year-old actor confirmed the report:
“One day I read the first 15 minutes of the film absolutely accurately” he said. “I can tell you now that 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 then the hand and bone burns away and goes sticking into the surface of Jakku” he added. “And this alien hand comes in, don’t know if it was Maz but it was an alien hand who takes the light saber way, and then the movie proceeds as you see it.”
So yes, despite the incredulity that first welcomed the rumor’s initial arrival into the world back in the summer of 2014, it turns out to be true. Before The Force Awakens underwent rewrites at the discretion of director J.J. Abrams and writer Lawrence Kasdan, the seventh Star Wars film started with a rather grotesque — yet oddly appropriate — bit of narrative imagery.
Makes you think about how much more popular the Disney-licensed severed hand toys would have been compared to BB-8.
(The Sun via Star Wars News Net)
