Star Wars: Episode VII (possibly subtitled The Ancient Fear) is still over a year away, but filming has gotten underway in Abu Dhabi, which means that all manner of press photographers have been hanging around in hopes of gaining new information about the hotly anticipating franchise update.
Now, TMZ has struck while the iron’s hot, posting a huge gallery of on-set images. A lot of the shots focus on the sci-fi objects that will make up the film’s Tatooine landscape, and this stranger to the franchise would be hard-pressed to imagine exactly just what a lot of them would be used for. However, there are also images of a massive new alien (glimpsed above) which TMZ reports was being operated by five men and was used in two scenes involving a Tatooine marketplace.
It also looks like director J.J. Abrams is working on shooting some material involving Luke Skywalker’s childhood home on Tatooine and a Mos Eisley-like location for traders. There aren’t really any plot details to be gleaned from these set images, but fans of the franchise will surely have a good time dissecting them and drawing their own conclusions about the direction that Star Wars: Episode VII is going in.
Media attention to this film has already been heavy as it completed its casting process and began to roll cameras, and one can only imagine that scrutiny will be intensified as Abrams continues to shoot the film. The notoriously secretive director will have a tough time keeping the franchise’s passionate fans at bay, but he’s dealt with mass hysteria before while working on Star Trek, so the director certainly knows what he’s in for.
Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, Harrison Ford, Anthony Daniels, Peter Mayhew, Kenny Baker, John Boyega, Daisy Ridley, Adam Driver, Oscar Isaac, Andy Serkis, Domhnall Gleeson and Max von Sydow star in Star Wars: Episode VII, which opens December 18th, 2015.