Speaking with Entertainment Weekly, director Gareth Edwards fleshed out some of the plot of his upcoming Star Wars movie, Rogue One. A big part of the action in the first non-Episode Star Wars movie in the Disney mega-verse will be set on a planet known as Jedha, a Holy Site for Jedi and other worshippers of the Force.
“The Force is basically in Star Wars like a religion, and they’re losing their faith in the period that we start the movie,” Edwards told EW . After Order 66 most of the Jedi are dead, cutting the moral heart out of the galaxy. “We were trying to find a physical location we could go to that would speak to the themes of losing your faith and the choice between letting the Empire win, or evil win, and good prevailing.”
Jedha is under occupation by Imperial troops and Edwards heavily implies it has everything to do with the kyber crystals that fuel both the Jedi’s lightsabers and the Empire’s Death Star superlaser.
“There’s something very important in Jedha that serves both the Jedi and the Empire. It felt very much like something we could relate to in the real world,” Edwards said.
The parallels between the occupied holy site of Jedha, valuable for its crystals, and the multiple military interventions by the United States in oil-producing nations of the Middle East are impossible to ignore. If that’s what Edwards had in mind, the metaphor would cast America as the evil Empire. Would that make Darth Vader Star Wars ’ Dick Cheney?
Jedha will also be where we meet some of the characters in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. Rogue One centers around a rag-tag group of Rebels stealing the plans to the Death Star, and it seems a handful of the suicide squad’s members have personal ties to the planet. “Within Jedha, even though there’s the oppressive foot of the Empire hanging over them, there’s a resistance that won’t give up and our characters have to go and meet people there to try and secure a person from this group,” Edwards said. Not only is it the homeworld of Bodhi Rook (Riz Ahmed), but it’s also where the team picks up blind warrior Chirrut Imwe (Donnie Yen) and his sidekick Baze Malbuz (Jiang Wen).
Rogue One: A Star Wars Story is out on Dec. 16.
