One of ‘Rogue One’s New Planets Was Inspired by Ridley Scott’s ‘Alien’

Movies in every genre take cues from other movies that came before, and sci-fi perhaps does this most of all. Gareth Edwards had never directed a space operatic sci-fi before Rogue One, so obviously he did some research before diving into directing the movie. There are elements of other Star Wars movies in Rogue One, of course, but he also revealed that there’s one planet introduced in the movie that’s modeled directly after the planet LV-426 from Ridley Scott’s Alien.

Fandango sat down with Edwards earlier this month and asked him what films inspired his new Star Wars movie. “Films that I used in there that got high score were Apocalypse Now; a little of Thin Red Line, and there’s a planet in our film that’s very much inspired by Alien,” he said. “Also Blade Runner, THX-1138 and of course the original Star Wars.”

There are definitely plenty of shots in the trailers we’ve seen that give an Apocalypse Now/Thin Red Line feel, like the Stormtroopers creeping through tall grasses and all those sequences of fighting on the beach. It’ll be interesting to see where Blade Runner and THX-1138 (George Lucas’ first feature) fit in, but we do know that the Alien-inspired planet he refers to is called Eadu, and in some of the trailers, it looks like this:

And, for comparison, here’s Alien’s sinister planet LV-426:

The lighting in both images is pretty dim, but you can see the similarities: dark blue, foggy atmosphere, rock outcroppings that seem to grow up form the ground like stalagmites, a general malaise of evil. There are probably no xenomorphs in Rogue One, but it’s a fun little callback to a classic.

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story opens in theaters December 16.