Star Wars: Rogue One Co-Writer Details Scrapped Darth Vader Attack on Scarif Scene

An important, and often overlooked part of screenwriting is the process of trimming down and [...]

By Charlie Ridgely

An important, and often overlooked part of screenwriting is the process of trimming down and chopping up your own work, removing or remixing scenes that you love in order to better serve the film's story. It's a difficult and frustrating process for writers, and it's especially prominent when working on franchise films. Any script for a film in something like Star Wars or the Marvel Cinematic Universe goes through so many different iterations before it gets approval from all the right people, which requires any number of rewrites along the way. Of course, this leads to some really awesome scene ideas left out of the final script. Rogue One: A Star Wars Story has one such scene.

Rogue One co-writer Gary Whitta spent some time answering questions from fans on Twitter Monday night, and one of his followers proceeded to ask him if he had any crazy scenes he had to cut out of his script for the film. He went on to reveal that his original version feature a scene in which Darth Vader went off on a group of Rebel soldiers on the beaches of Scarif.

"Rebel ground troops bunkered in around the Imperial comms tower on Scarif, stormtroopers can't break through to get to Jyn who's on her way to transmit plans," Whitta explains. "Vader says, 'Put me on that beach.' Carnage ensues. You ended up seeing something like that in the corridor scene though."

Of course, as Whitta says in the tweet, we did end up seeing a version of the scene in the final cut of Rogue One, though it wasn't nearly as big. At the very end of the movie, Vader lays waste to an entire group of Rebels in a hallway. The soldiers are trapped and trying to get the plans for the Death Star to the Rebel leaders when Vader tracks them down. He slaughters each and every one of them, though they are able to pass along the plans to someone else before Vader can get his hands on them.

That final scene has remained one of the most memorable of the entire movie, as it gave Darth Vader one of his only opportunities in all of Star Wars to showcase his sheer brutality. Some fans would argue that the sequence in Rogue One is one of Vader's all-around best.

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