Grab your winter jackets and feed your Tauntauns, because Star Wars: Episode VII could be making a return trip to one of The Empire Strikes Back’s most famous locations if this new tantalizing tidbit from Roger Moore is accurate.
Moore, aka James Bond, walked the same hallowed ground as Kevin Smith recently, and while the iconic actor didn’t emerge from the Episode VII sets with tears in his eyes, he did tell the BBC what he saw – and what he saw, according to this piece over at The Guardian, was a planet that sounds a whole lot like Hoth.
Moore tells Graham Norton that he was on set alongside Harrison Ford, and that they were filming something "with a lot of mountains and snow." This has immediately set fans to speculating that a return trip to Hoth – home to the famous sequence where Rebels in Snow Speeders took on the Empire’s giant AT-ATs – is happening.
But is that really what this is?
Roger Moore couldn’t elaborate on what he saw, because he signed a Non-Disclosure Agreement, so we can only speculate. But it’s not as if Hoth is the only ice planet in the galaxy. It could be Hoth, just like Luke could be on Dagobah, and the desert locations they were scouting could be Tatooine. The point is, we’re all projecting a lot of detail onto tiny little morsels of information.
A more interesting theory is that the snow world is actually the planet the Sith supposedly weaponize in the new film. That’s another bit of story speculation that may or may not be true, but we know the film has shot footage at Skellig Michael island in Ireland. Rumors (don’t you love them?) have indicated that the production would return there later this year to film more material, when there’s snow everywhere and the place looks pretty barren. Maybe that’s why they’re shooting scenes with snow and mountains – it could be some sort of assault on this new organic Death Star. Like most things Episode VII, you have to file this under speculation, but it is one alternative theory about why the production would be filming scenes on an icy planet.
The other theory is that it is indeed Hoth, and we get a return visit to the planet as part of Han and company’s search for Luke. That makes sense, because Hoth seems like the sort of desolate wasteland a Jedi seeking some "me time" might pick for his home. You could do swampy Dagobah, or icy Hoth. Plus, this allows J.J. Abrams to do a little fan-servicing by including another location that ties back to the original trilogy.
At this point, an icy planet could be just about anything – including either of these potential locations, or something entirely different. Would you want to revisit Hoth in Episode VII? Weigh in below.
