I’m going to assume you meant “Jedha scenes” and not “Jedi scenes” (damn you autocorrect). If not please elaborate because then I have no idea what you’re referring to.
Truth be told I don’t think the chance is very great. In fact of all the pre-existing locations Jedha is probably the least likely. Not that it wouldn’t be a great place to revisit and I really hope Jedha would take a bigger and more significant place in canon given it past, but the climate of Jedha post- Death Star attack is not one that lends itself to extended outdoor location shooting.
Even though people kept living on Jedha for years after the Death Star’s attack it was a frigid hellscape plagued by constant dust storms, which required breathing masks to move about outside even then. And it was clear that it would only get worse from then on. So 34 years plus whatever timeskip there is between TLJ and IX, after it would likely take environmental suits or something to move about outside. And even if it didn’t take that much, creating extended dust storms in an outdoor location seems more bother than it’s worth.
As per the Roya News article posted yesterday the shooting at Wadi Rum took about three weeks, which is the same amount of time as the Jakku shooting in Saudia Arabia did for TFA. So we can expect something of the same length as the Jakku sequence in IX at wherever Wadi Rum is supposed to be.
Technically speaking if they were to recreate Jedha and have that long a sequence there, cgi, set pieces and green screen would to me make for a more logical choice things being what they are.
Plus Wadi Rum is basically big movie’s go to location for “rocky desert scenery” to the extend that Jordan have an industry catering exclusively to big movie companies that come there to shoot. So for any rocky desert location that JJ had in mind shooting at Wadi Rum would be a perfectly logical choice.
So yeah, I do think Jedha unlikely as much as I want to see the place again. If I were to place a bet on where Wadi Rum is my money would be on either Jakku doue to its significance for both Finn and Rey, and the fact that in early new canon it was being set up as a place of significance for the story, or somewhere new we’ve never heard of before.
~Mod Mara
Yeah I meant Jedha shots sorry for the confusion 😂 I agree Jedha isn’t very likely, I just wish they’d revisit its significance in some way if not the location since this is a trilogy purportedly about the meaning of the Force.
I’d be very excited if IX revisited Jakku especially if they deal with Finn and Rey’s history with the place. Maybe they’ll even use some of the EU plot threads, who knows.
Some interesting development on the Episode IX shooting front.
Yesterday John posted this pic on his Instragram of him flying somewhere
and today he posted a video of a prayer call from a mosque, here a screencap of the video.
Now a quick bit of Googlemancy have led me to believe that that is the Abu Dawoud mosque in Aqaba, Jordan.
Why is this at all interesting?
Because Aqaba is the closest large city to the Wadi Rum desert where the IX team started shooting about a week and a half ago as reported by Making Star Wars. The person who initially noticed the IX set being set up in Wadi Rum said he thought he saw Daisy Ridley being given a tour, but he only saw her at a distance and in a brief glimpse, and frankly given the number of youngish, white brunettes in Star Wars there are others it could have been: Daisy’ stunt double or Keri Russle just to name two we know are involved in IX.
But if Daisy it was it is just confirmation of what we already knew, that Finn and Rey will spend a good deal of time together in IX.
What’s interesting to me is where this is supposed to be. Speculation have gone into it as the Making Star Wars page shows, personally I find the most compelling theory to be Jakku if it is a repeat location and not somewhere entirely new.
I could see Rey go back to Jakku to find answers about her family that aren’t told to her by a Dark sider known to be lying through his teeth.
For Finn there’s another thing entirely. For one thing emotional closure over what happened at Tuanul, there was nothing he could have done to prevent what happened but that massacre left a profound impact on him and he might feel a need now that time have passed to face the location again. For another there is on Jakku an old Imperial base, in fact it’s the base where the First Order was born so to speak, when Rae Sloane killed Gallius Rax and took the Imperial remnant with her to the secret location discovered by the late Emperor where the Empire could be reborn. And finally that base is also where Brendol Hux, father of Armitage Hux, first created what later became known as Operation resurrection, the First Order’s code name for the Stormtrooper program.
Yes there is indeed many interesting plots that could be spawned by a revisit to Jakky for Finn and Rey both.
~Mod Mara
A Star Wars sequel movie? Do actual worldbuilding and follow through on its own and EU materials’ plot threads? Dare I hope? Jakku on TFA was filmed at Rub’ al Khali desert, Abu Dhabi, but there’s precedent for location changes on the same planet. The Tatooine scenes in ANH were filmed around Tunisia but the ones in RotJ were filmed in U.S. locations, for instance.
A potential point of interest is that Rub’ al Khali is a sand desert, the largest continuous sand desert (erg) in the world, while Wadi Rum is a valley, the largest in Jordan. Rub’ al Khali was perfect for shooting things like the trackless desert that Finn wandered through, while Wadi Rum would be great for showing dramatic crag formations–like the Jakku Observatory located under the Plaintive Hand Plateau, perhaps, which Rax was originally guarding?
(Wadi Rum, btw, evidently means “the valley of light/airborne sand.” I’m guessing we won’t see Anakin’s Force ghost there.)
Tuanul was also a religious community, and the Church of the Force could tie into a larger plot about the Force. The Lor San Tekka character was set up to be a seeker after the ways of the Force much like Maz and Chirrut. He was a Church member too, since the days of the Empire when it was illegal in fact, so it’s easy to see why he would have been with them when he was on an inhospitable world. But what was he doing there? Was he on a religious retreat, or visiting with his religious brethren? Or was he a guest while on other business? If so, what was he trying to discover?
It would be perfect if Finn and Rey could revisit the sites of their trauma amid all this plot and worldbuilding as well. Finn could go to the ruins of Tuanul, perhaps to look for clues, and Rey could see the devastation for herself and see what Finn was talking about when he said he made a choice. Rey could visit Niima outpost, or its remains if it was destroyed. At minimum I want an answer what the ship she saw flying away was about. Finn and Rey could support each other and talk, something they didn’t get to do in TLJ or even TFA.
This was inspiried by @lj-writes incredible meta about Finn being immune to the Force.
Now of course this could simpy be an anomaly in the Force but I’m not a fan of “that’s simply how it is”, so I couldn’t help but connect this to the overall story and to a headcanon I’ve tried to somehow connect Finn to for a while.
First: I LOVE Jakku – much unlike Finn. 😀 One thing I love in particular are the dead-enders, why they are seemingly insane and what they might be guarding.
We know, even thanks to TLJ LOL, that the First Order was looking for Force sensitive children and paid huge prices for them. But what for? A secret army? The only other Force sensitive beings we know of who are somehow connected to the FO right now are the Knights of Ren and they are Luke’s former students who joined Kylo. Of course it’s possible there are more of them now but I keep wondering if the FO wanted to do a little more with these children than train them.
And here’s where my favorite Jakku theory comes in. There indeed is/was a secret Imperial Base on Jakku. In my headcanon it’s obviously connected to the Emperor’s original plans. In his need to control the Galaxy he started an experiment on Jakku that, if successful, would increase the Force powers of regular people to insane degrees to the point they could control physical matter entirely and alter reality. Obviously the experiment never worked, so the base essentially contained the machinery for a failed experiment. Since Jakku wasn’t, as originally planned, destroyed this set up stayed in place.
Flash foward a few years… Snoke decides to continue the Emperor’s plans but succeed this time. This includes the experiment. So the FO start kidnapping and buying not just children for the Stormtrooper program but also specifically Force sensitive children to build an army but also to continue the experiment. So they return to Jakku and begin to further develop the experiment, so that it works this time. Of course Snoke’s final goal is to make it safe and then use the devices on himself. However the experiment is extremely dangerous and it’s calculated that only people with a very high Midichlorian count can even surivive it, especially in the beginning stages. So the FO begin to kidnap and collect children with the highest Midichlorian numbers. This also explains Snoke’s interest in Kylo. He’s meant to be his final test subject before he transforms himself. Of course all test subjects who complete the experiment successfully are meant to be killed because the risks of just one of them turning against Snoke are too high.
Finn and Rey – whoever she is could be up for debate, you know what my take would be – are part of a group of children the First Order wants to use for the experiment. While the experiment is being set up something goes horribly, horribly wrong. The FO personal loses control of the machines, everything sort of implodes and the entire energy created by them gets released into the surroundings. Most of the people there die, including the children. The only survivors are the dead-enders, Finn and Rey. The dead-enders who up to that point were FO officers who had been guarding the entrance of the base lost most of their memories, are injured and completely confused. Finn and Rey are wandering around confused and without any memories around the debris of the destroyed base.
After a while a recovery team arrives. They find the confused dead-enders and two children who are still arrive. They quickly check if the experiment had any effect on Rey and Finn. To their disappointment the malfunction seems to have taken the girl’s Force abilities away completely but there is something odd about the boy. They decide that without Force sensitivity or memories the girl is useless to them but they can’t bring themselves to kill her, so they leave her with Unkar Plutt and later tell Snoke that she died as well. The boy shows odd anomalities though, so they take him back to the FO to explore it further. They leave the dead-enders there, seeing they keep guarding the base since they’re aware some of the locals might’ve heard the explosion and could come looking. The idea is that whoever turns up to check what happened only finds the confused and injured officers and decides better not to look further. Which is exactly what happened.
Back in the FO’s headquarters It’s discovered that Finn is in fact absorbing the Force like a black hole and no Force user can influence him or use the Force on him. The FO officers advise Snoke to have the boy killed but he’s too curious about this unwanted result and decides he should be observed and hidden inside the Stormtrooper program. Almost nobody knows of his existence. Meanwhile Rey starts living a scavenger life on Jakku and after a few years the massive block the experiment caused to her Force abilities and her memories losens up when she’s sleeping.
I can add several details to this but that’s truly the essence of it. I hope you like it a bit.
OMG I love this. Such a creepy story possibility that actually answers the seeming coincidence of Rey being found on Jakku of all places. I can also imagine alternative versions–maybe Finn and Rey were both trying to hide and actually got away for a while before the soldiers caught up to them, and Rey, hidden better because she was smaller, helplessly watched as Finn was taken away. She herself might fall in with hard-up scavengers who later sell her, with her confused memory taking them for her parents. It could be why both of them were so drawn to each other, because their repressed and messed-up memories still reacted unconsciously at the sight of each other.
I don’t understand the people who say that Kylo would have worked better if he had been a random, I really don’t. Kylo’s connection to the Skywalker bloodline, along with the lack of clear motive for his actions, is the entire point.
See, he’s a Nazi.
Okay, so technically he’s an allegory for a neo-Nazi in a space fantasy setting, but given that this hellsite has a distinct difficulty with complex concepts I’ll keep it simple. He’s a Nazi.
Why did Nazis do what they did? Why do neo-Nazis do what they do?
If you peel away all the embellishments and propaganda it comes right down to this: they see themselves as having a special legacy, a special bloodline to protect and they have a right to do so because they feel they’ve been chosen.
JJ has said that the early concept of Jedikiller only started working when they made him connected to the Skywalker bloodline, to the chosen family in Star Wars.
Kylo’s motivation, like that of all Nazis, is that he’s doing this because he belongs to the chosen people and thus have a right to rule. Not because he’s qualified, but because he belongs to the destined people.
No it’s not deep or complex, but it was never meant to be. Kylo is an antagonist and one JJ always meant to emulate a neo-Nazi. Giving him complex motivation would have detracted from this and, like with the real life equivalent, made it possible to justify what he’s doing because he has X, Y, Z motivation. Instead JJ gave him the most basic motivation of Nazis, he’s right because he’s chosen and because he has the strength to do what he does.
It’s not glorious. It’s pathetic, sad and ultimately someone who’s irredeemable. Not because he couldn’t choose differently than he does but because it’s not a motivation that makes anyone want to see him redeemed.
Of course, even people who sees Kylo as a villain and antagonist have a really hard time accepting him being a Nazi, so maybe this view isn’t really that surprising.
I mean the actor himself told us that Kylo Ren is an elitist (link), it’s not that deep people.
[Adam Driver] refuses to see his character as bratty. “There is a little bit of an
elitist, royalty thing going on,” he says, reminding us that the
character’s estranged mom is “the princess. I think he’s aware of maybe
the privilege.”
Cass Sunstein has criticized TLJ in part because Kylo didn’t fall due to losing a loved one (link), but maybe that’s because… Kylo is no Anakin… and is not nearly as sympathetic?
Mr. Dark Side, Kylo Ren, does have a bit of a struggle, and in that
sense, Johnson maintains continuity with Lucas’s vision. But in this
movie, at least, the struggle turns out to be a head fake. Because
Kylo’s descent doesn’t have the precipitating cause of Anakin’s – the
loss of loved ones – and because we don’t see Kylo suppressing the
better angels of his nature, the film doesn’t come anywhere close to the
depths of Lucas’s films.
If anyone is positioned as the new Anakin–but with a happy ending–it’s Rey, in struggling with the loss of loved ones, or at least her idea of them, and also in resisting manipulation by her would-be abusive mentor Kylo where Anakin fell to Palpatine’s manipulation. It’s interesting that Sunstein couldn’t recognize this story when it manifested in a female character, though to be sure it’s a common enough blind spot and RJ didn’t make it easy for anyone.
Precisely.
People, not just Cass here, are obsessed with having Kylo be the next Vader/Anakin, but he isn’t. Not to mention they’re even more obsessed with the reason why he fell to the Dark Side than they are with Rey’s parentage.
But let me ask you something. Did we know why Anakin fell in the OT? No, we didn’t, because the reason for it wasn’t relevant to Luke for whom Vader was a foil.
Is it relevant to Finn or to Rey why Kylo fell? So far we’ve been given not a single reason why this information should be relevant to either of them, so I don’t get why people are so upset about not knowing.
Except as yet another case of prioritizing the white guy over the two actual leads in the ST. Kylo’s motives for turning to the Dark are no more interesting or relevant to the narrative than Vader’s were in the OT. It’s not a plot hole, it’s not a flaw in the storytelling, it’s intentional. Only the parts of Kylo and his actions that are pertinent to Finn and Rey are relevant to the story, and unless someone can come up with a good reason why either of them should remotely care about it it’s going to remain irrelevant.
All too true. (You and @lj-writes are killin it with the meta lately).
It’s funny, too, because Rey’s “nobody” revelation effectively removes the possibility that he fell because of a lost loved one. The Rey Solo theory revolves around a Solo family tragedy before Kylo’s fall (Leia implies in TFA that the family was dealing with something that led to sending him to Luke, which is open to interpretation but fit with the loss of another child). Rey was taken and believed to be dead, throwing the family into turmoil and pushing a grieving Ben toward the Dark Side. The Rey Solo theory doesn’t always attribute Rey’s disappearance to Kylo’s fall, but when it does it gives Kylo a sympathetic reason to embrace the darkness. (The death of Anakin Solo was a turning point for Jacen Solo/Darth Caedus in the EU, so it isn’t hard to get onboard with the idea that Rey was a combination of Anakin and Jaina Solo.)
Rey being nobody shatters that. Fandom rejoiced because it meant they could get together and have Pure Force Babies (something the narrative has never suggested was a goal of Kylo’s even with his Nazi mindset), but it gives him no reason to be like he is other than toxic entitlement based on bloodline.
(They’ll say the reason is Snoke’s supposed brainwashing, but that ignores the fact that the ST remains firmly about choices.)
Yes. It’s important not to ignore the fact that Kylo’s entitlement stems from his lineage. He is the only Star Wars villain (iirc) who’s actual ideology aligns with Nazism, where others wore it as an “evil” aesthetic. Sure, the Empire and FO are human supremacists, but Kylo represents white supremacy in a much more tangible way.
When he confronts Rey and Finn on the crumbling Starkiller Base, it’s almost heavy-handed, but for the fact that most of the audience didn’t see it. A volatile white man holding on to his flickering “birthright,” demanding a woman and Black man return the power (Luke’s saber) that he believes belongs to him.
That’s not subtlety. Nor is the scene where Kylo orders the slaughter of the villagers. Especially when Finn was very clearly put into the position of a soldier “just following orders” (the Nuremberg Defense), but chose to disobey.
Fans remove Kylo’s culpability because he didn’t pull the trigger, but do we consider the Nazis who issued the orders but didn’t kill firsthand less culpable? FUCK NO.
So people can hem and haw about how it’s wrong to say Kylo is a Nazi/white supremacist parallel, but it’s in the narrative, especially under JJ’s watch.
You right, JJ isn’t remotely subtle. He never was and in this case the only way he could have been less subtle about would be to name them Nazis and give the characters names such as Adolf and Hermann.
And no there’s never been a quite this obvious Nazi analogy in Star Wars before. The Empire was simply about might makes right and the rule of the strongest, in many ways it was simply generic fascism with some Nazi aesthetics on top to make it look cooler.
The whole “preserving/claiming a birthright/legacy” is a new theme for a Dark Side character. Or rather, it is Kylo’s own fucked up version of the past and his birthright he’s trying to claim. Just as with real life Nazis it’s not actually their past, culture and people they’re trying to claim and protect, it’s their own private, revised, fucked up version of it they’re on about.
As a lot of people have pointed out his words to Vader’s helmet doesn’t make any sense because what Vader really wanted was to protect his family. But I’ll posit that they’re not supposed to make sense in the historical context of the universe because it’s not even Vader/Anakin’s legacy Kylo is trying to protect or claim, it’s his own revised, fucked up version of it.
Yes Rey Solo or I’d argue even Rey Skywalker could have given Kylo a sympathetic motive for turning to the Dark Side, but as things stand he doesn’t have.
More than that, TFA does everything it can to make Kylo look unsympathetic and paint him in a negative light without making him completely one dimensional.
Like this is a universe where the space Nazis after being defeated fucked off to “space Argentina” but rather than just lay low and die out they get right back at it becoming proud space neo-Nazis.
One organization that was an important the Nazi Germany was Hitlerjugend. It was a paramilitary organization of which membership was mandatory for all German boys between the age of 6 and 18. It was meant to not only teach them proper Nazi values and ideals, but also turn them into good soldiers.
In a universe such as the present Star Wars one where the in-universe Nazis fucked off and restarted the in-universe version of Hitlerjugend would absolutely be an important thing too.
Does it sound familiar? Do we know of a character who had grown up under such conditions?
Indeed we do.
Another thing.
Ideologies and organizations such as the (vague) one the First Order espouses is supposed to attract people who feels disenfranchised, are economically disadvantaged and/or have a great need to belong to someone or some place and struggles with their identity.
Do we know of such a character in the story?
Well, look at that.
But it isn’t Finn or Rey who turns to the First Order, though they should have every single reason to. No, the one who embraces it is this asshole:
Ben Solo. Raised with just about every single privileged know. Loving parents, financial secure, erudite and educated. He is the one who embraces the First Order, because his own fucked up, revised version of his “legacy” entitles him too.
Or so he thinks.
Which leads me back to the beginning of all of this.
JJ stripped Kylo of all ideological motivation to make it impossible to use that to excuse or defend his actions. In creating Finn and Rey as the characters he did, JJ also undermines every personal motivation Kylo could use to make himself look good.
The last two years have been something of an experience watching fandom trying to justify Kylo’s actions and argue that he’s actually, deep down good, when everything in the narrative told us the opposite. Even TLJ could justify his actions, instead it just ran avoidance tactics on the topic never addressing it. Even Rian knew that in a story where Finn and Rey exists, where Kylo has no ideological convictions beyond claiming his birthright, it isn’t possible to make him look sympathetic.
On a closing note. The whole “pure Force babies” thing always made me want to thrown up. Do these people realize who and what they sound as spouting that shit. I’ve hears actual Nazis be more circumspect in their phrasing than these people.
If you had asked me a year or two ago if they were aware or not, I’d have said they weren’t. Now I’m no where near as sure that these people aren’t 100% aware of who and what they sound as saying that shit. I’m wondering if they think they’re cool doing that.
The part about the FO attracting disenfranchised people like Rey is 100% canonical and intentional. That’s one of the FO’s schticks, positioning themselves as the great hope for those who are underprivileged and desperate. Not only that, there are at least two high-ranking FO characters–Gallius Rax and The Cardinal–who are actually from Jakku and trapped in poverty until the FO picked them up and gave them opportunities. Though not from Jakku, Phasma in her novel was similarly from a poverty-stricken, constantly warring post-apocalyptic world. I have pointed out before that the FO thrived in part due to the Republic’s failure to provide economic justice (link).
Also, your analysis reveals more clearly why Kylostans have gone the path of either arguing he’s brainwashed or justifying his actions. JJ purposefully took away the traditional ideological or emotional “justifications” for the character’s actions, forcing Kylostans to either show their ass and say his actions are inherently right/understandable or fall back on saying his character is essentially a puppet.
I remember when I delved deep into Reylow meta and came out of it a committed anti, one of the first things I noticed and an early turn-off was how distinctly fascistic the rhetoric sounded, like Kylo believes in the rule of the strong over the weak (that’s accurate) and Rey is powerful (uh-huh) and that makes them a perfect match (what?!). (Link) The Force Baby shit only upped that impression, and really that was never what SW was about. Both Anakin and Leia married non-Force users, and Luke as far as we know never had children at all in this continuity. The fact that a subset of fans think SW is/should be about Force eugenics in contrast to everything it’s actually stood foris seriously disturbing. Idk why people seriously think JJ wou do that.
L.J.'s Obsessions 