I made this mockup a few weeks ago and forgot to upload it until now:
https://vimeo.com/221051395
Password: leia

The intention was to find enough footage to cover the entire Starkiller cue without cuts, though I did have to slightly truncate the end since I wanted the original musical placement with the Hosnian shots. It’s more of a ‘what if’ than a serious suggestion.

However, I do really like the shot of Leia directly before the destruction of Hosnian Prime. In the original film, it is very obvious that Leia reacts to Han’s death through the Force, but here it is unclear whether she knows of his death at all. The development of her latent Force sensitivity is irrelevant to the film, and could even undercut the value of Luke to the story if Leia was strong enough to feel the death of a single person halfway across the galaxy. It may even be more tragic that she cannot sense his death, depriving her of even his final moment. This humanizes her and quickly reframes the sequence as being about her relationship to the system which is about to be destroyed. Leia is our only substantial character connection to the New Repubic (through her backstory and through Sella), just as she and Ben were the only substantial character connections to Alderaan. It is through them that we feel the loss of the planets, and so placing Leia directly ahead of the destruction and the death of Kor Sella, it allows the audience to ‘feel’ the destruction in a personal way.

In other news, has there been any progress on the overall edit? I assume this project needs the final versions of Maz’s Castle, the X-wing approach to the Starkiller shot, and the un-timecoded Leia scene to be provided by Sir Ridley, but is there anything other than that?