'Star Wars: Episode 8' Locations Evoke The Old World In The Search For A New Jedi Temple

Star Wars: Episode 8 shooting locations all over the globe reveal a key difference between The Force Awakens and its upcoming sequel. Episode 8 looks to embody the Old World, which might have major implications for the past and the future of the Jedi Order.

The locations in Star Wars: The Force Awakens were elemental. Jakku, Starkiller Base, Takodana and D’Qar embody deserts, tiagas, forests and pastures. Other than Maz Kanata—whose castle felt like a resilient frontier outpost—the aliens skittering over these surfaces were transient, displaced, and semi-nomadic. Jakku’s scavengers fed on the corpses of war machines while the Resistance holed up in retasked earthen mounds.

In The Force Awakens we witness a galaxy in transition, struggling to climb out of the utter societal destruction caused by generations of war, backsliding as much as they’re progressing.

Star Wars: Episode 8 will look deep into the past instead, reminding us that the galactic politics of Star Wars span eons. So far we know of four shooting locations for Episode 8.

The movie will open on Ahch-To, where Luke Skywalker has rediscovered the first Jedi Temple. Just as in the final moments of The Force Awakens , Irish island Skellig Michael and its sixth-century Christian monastery is the real-world location for Ahch-To. Though the planet was unnamed in the final cut of The Force Awakens, subsequent reveals from the script and the novelization revealed its background.

Episode 8 will also shoot at Pinewood Studios, an English film studio with a long Star Wars history. The Millennium Falcon was rebuilt there and leaked photos suggest Rian Johnson is having Skellig Michael locations recreated on-site.

On Monday, Making Star Wars got word of location scouting in Mexico. A representative for the Mexico City Film Commission told Sopitas, “They came scouting for a film and toured Tláhuac and Iztapalapa. They were interested in caves and the grotto species there. Due to its characteristics they thought they could pretend to be from another planet.”

Finally, there’s Dubrovnik, one of the best preserved medieval walled cities in the world, and a main location for Game of Thrones. Episode 8 looks to be building an entirely new planet location in the medieval city.

All of these locations suggest the timeworn and the antiquated. These are not temporary forward operating bases or refugee settlements. They are places steeped in galactic history, borrowing the aura of our shared human history.

Expanded Star Wars storytelling in comics and novels also suggest that Episode 8 will find Luke looking to the past for guidance in rebuilding the Jedi Order with Rey.

In the Marvel comic miniseries Star Wars: Shattered Empire, Luke teams up with Poe Dameron’s mother, Shara Bey, to steal trees from a laboratory aboard an Imperial Star Destroyer. “These are all that remain of the tree that grew at the heart of the Jedi temple on Coruscant,” Skywalker says, “The Force is with them.”

Luke was trained by Obi-Wan Kenobi and Yoda, so it’s natural that he reached back to their Coruscant era in building his own Jedi Order. But it didn’t work. Kylo and his fellow Knights of Ren decimated Luke’s first attempt, killing his padawans (assuming Rey’s Force vision proves accurate).

So he’s reached back even further. Adopting the ascetic monkishness forced on Obi-Wan, Luke has lived in self-imposed exile. Sure, his hair’s great, but there’s a deep pool of sadness in the character’s heart by the time of The Force Awakens.

Can Luke and Rey find the ancient Jedi knowledge to turn Kylo to the light and subvert Supreme Leader Snoke? The renewed focus on ancient galactic locations exemplified in these early Star Wars: Episode 8 leaks suggest that to do so, they’ll have to dig deep into the past.

The Force Awakens was a movie of fire and ice, as new characters discovered the raw energy inside of them. Episode 8 is looking more and more like old stairs, smooth and bowed in the center from the thousands of footsteps that came before, leading down to traditions and knowledge that temper and focus The Force.