8 Problems Nobody Wants To Admit About Star Wars: The Force Awakens

4. The Missing Footage

To be fair to JJ, a lot of the editing choices he made are logical, time-saving maneuvers, designed to make TFA more streamlined. That said, there's also a ton of stuff on the cutting room floor that would've either a) answered some burning questions or b) added to and enriched this new take on the saga. It starts with small stuff, like Constable Zuvio - the apparent local law enforcement on Jakku. The character was important enough to warrant his own action figure, but evidently not to merit his actual inclusion in the film. Which is fine, to an extent; superfluous characters and scenes tend to stand out as such (Rathtars, anyone?). But then the edits become ever more glaring, like with how Poe Dameron miraculously turns up alive and well (after being MIA for a good chunk of the movie) leading his X-Wing squadron to save everyone on Takodana. This comes after being stranded on Jakku; a notably backwater planet where the locals are extremely unlikely to help an escaped prisoner who's just crash-landed in the desert. Yet somehow he finds his way off-planet to arrive at a time when the story needs him to. It's fitting that Oscar Isaac's last movie was called Ex Machina. That's not even mentioning Maz Kanata's sudden disappearance from the film after her castle is destroyed, considering how monumentally important her character seems to be to the entire new trilogy. Although Abrams has explained that she was originally dragged along to D'Qar with the rest, this apparently added nothing to the rest of the movie, so she was cut - but doesn't cutting her out entirely with no explanation affect the quality of the film just as bad?