WARNING: This article contains spoilers for Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
If the $2 billion plus global box office haul is anything to go by, fans were pretty satisfied with Star Wars: The Force Awakens. That doesn't mean the movie doesn't have its fair share of critics, and one of the more common nitpicks concerns General Leia hugging Rey after Han Solo's death instead of Solo's long-time friend Chewbacca.
In an interview with Slashfilm promoting 10 Cloverfield Lane, director JJ Abrams admitted that the decision "was probably one of the mistakes I made in that. My thinking at the time was that Chewbacca, despite the pain he was feeling, was focused on trying to save Finn and getting him taken care of. So I tried to have Chewbacca go off with him and focus on Rey, and then have Rey find Leia and Leia find Rey."
"The idea being that both of them being strong with the Force and never having met, would know about each other — that Leia would have been told about her beyond what we saw onscreen and Rey of course would have learned about Leia. And that reunion would be a meeting and a reunion all in one, and a sort of commiseration of their mutual loss."
"Had Chewbacca not been where he was, you probably wouldn’t have thought of it", Abrams continued. "But because he was right there, passed by Leia, it felt almost like a slight, which was definitely not the intention."
Abrams' explanation goes a long way to helping us understand why the scene played out the way it did, but the fact that Rey and Leia sought each other out still poses some interesting questions. Hopefully we'll get some answers in Rian Johnson's Episode 8.
Directed by JJ Abrams and starring Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, John Boyega, Daisy Ridley, and Adam Driver, Star Wars: The Force Awakens will be available to digital download on April 11, 2016, and out on DVD and Blu-Ray on April 5, 2016 in the US and April 18, 2016 in the UK.
