Rogue One Bits: New Details On Jedha, A Mysterious New Planet Name, And A First Look At New LEGO Sets

In this edition of Rogue One Bits:

A new Rogue One TV spot played during the Olympics, featuring footage of various athletes intercut with scenes from the film. There's not too much here, although we are treated to a few new shots of various characters. The embed above isn't pretty, but it'll get the job done for now.

At Star Wars Celebration, we learned about the planet Jedha, a place of great spiritual importance for believers in the Force...and also a place occupied by Imperial forces. You've already seen Jedha in the released Rogue One footage – the Jedha scenes were shot in Jordan and the Middle Eastern location lends a certain amount of weight to the story of an occupied and war torn region.

We know that many of the main characters in Rogue One converge on Jedha, so Entertainment Weekly sat down with director Gareth Edwards to discuss this planet and its importance to the film as a whole. As Edwards explains, this story is set in a universe where people are losing faith, making Jedha more important than ever to true believers:

The Force is basically in Star Wars like a religion, and they're losing their faith in the period that we start the movie. 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. It got embodied in this place we called Jedha.

However, the Imperial occupation isn't just about trampling on the memory of the Jedi. Although he doesn't reveal any details, there is something on Jedha that is important to both sides of the conflict:

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.

While Edwards is keeping the details close to the vest, it seems that nobody got around to telling star Donnie Yen that this is classified information. In a completely separate interview, the actor behind the blind warrior Chirrut (who we meet as he makes a spiritual pilgrimage to Jedha) explained that...well, if Edwards wants to keep it a secret, we should consider it a spoiler. The video below and the next paragraph should be considered spoiler territory for sensitive parties.

.@DonnieYenCT reveals connection between planet Jeddah & light sabers! #RogueOne #StarWars #SWCE pic.twitter.com/RhAxe6O3vk

— ExtraTV (@extratv) July 17, 2016

So there you go: Jedha is home to resources that are necessary to construct lightsabers. Could that mean Kyber crystals, the rare, Force-enhanced resources that form the cores of Jedi weapons? If so, it's easy to imagine that these same crystals could be used to create another powerful weapon, albeit something on a much larger scale. Maybe Jedha is so important to the Empire because they're using old Jedi resources to construct the Death Star.

Captain Cassian Andor #RogueOne

A photo posted by Star Wars Movies (@starwarsmovies) on Aug 4, 2016 at 12:00pm PDT

First of all, here's a new look at Diego Luna's Cassian Andor, the Rebel Alliance soldier assigned to work with (and possibly corral) Felicity Jones' Jyn Erso. More importantly, you can see Bistan, AKA Space Monkey, standing in the crowd behind him.

Speaking of Cassian, Star Wars News Net taken one look at a leaked image of his Black Series action figure and has done some impressive digging. It seems that the packaging features a name we haven't seen before: Eadu. As the collectors in the audience know, Star Wars Black series figures tend to feature planet names alongside character names on the packaging, allowing for buyers to distinguish between multiple different versions of the character (which also allows Lucasfilm and Hasbro to sell the same character several times in different costumes). This means that the outfit Cassian is wearing in this plastic figure is the one he wears on Eadu...wherever that is.

You should click the link above if you want to the whole story (and it is a fun journey down the Rogue One rabbit hole), but there are two obvious contenders here. Eadu could be the barren planet with the dark soil we've seen in several images, mainly because these scenes were filmed in Iceland and they would necessitate the heavy clothing Cassian is wearing on his tiny plastic body. However, it could also be the name of a city on the planet Jedha, because he is also wearing that same outfit in those scenes.

If you've been waiting for hi-res, non-watermarked versions of Rogue One images to hit the internet, congratulations! This is your lucky day. Peruse the gallery below at you own leisure.

The first wave of new Rogue One toys won't hit shelves until Force Friday next month, but The Brothers Brick has obtained images of several new LEGO sets via the Italian and Spanish Amazon stores. As usual, the toy department is the leakiest section of even the most secretive film production. I'm not going to directly share the images here because other sites have been asked to take them down (and I'm not in the mood to get sued), but you can check them out at the link above. Anyway, the big revelations here are that Jyn Erso is a sergeant, Director Krennic has a black shuttle that looks like the cousin of Kylo Ren's shuttle in Star Wars: The Force Awakens, and that AT-ST walkers may be patrolling the streets of Jedha. These toys also offer a new look at the TIE Strikers and U-Wing fighters, both of which we can probably expect to see everywhere over the coming months.

Now, let's take a moment to explore an unofficial Rogue One LEGO creation! LEGO builder markus19840420 (via The Brothers Brick) has recreated the shot of that mysterious chamber from the film's trailer, complete with those red-robed Imperial guards and that black-robed figure kneeling before...a Bacta tank? That's what the internet seems to think it is. In any case, it's strong work, especially since we don't know the context of this moment yet.

A new episode of Star Wars Explained proposes a very nifty theory. What if the planet Scarif, the tropical paradise and the site of the Death Star's construction, is actually Rakata Prime? Although the Knights of the Old Republic video game has been consigned to to "Legends" status, the mysterious planet introduced in its final stretch has been included in the new canon map of the Star Wars universe, which means that there may be plans to bring Rakata Prime back into continuity. Scarif, which we have seen in the trailers for Rogue One, could be codename for this planet, which was once used to construct another gigantic super weapon tens of thousands of years before the events of the original trilogy. This strikes me as a little unlikely, but it's something fun to ponder as we embark inch our way toward December.

Let's end this edition of Rogue One Bits with this piece of animation created by visual effects supervisor and ILM chief creative officer John Knoll, which offers an immaculate walking tour of the Death Star hangar bay. In addition to his VFX work, Knoll is the first man behind Rogue One, pitching the basic concept to Kathleen Kennedy years ago and earning a story credit in the process.