Rub' al Khali desert, surrounded by Saudi Arabia, Oman, United Arab Emirates, and Yemen. The Jakku sequences were filmed in the UAE section near the Liwa Oasis, which is under the governance of Abu Dhabi.
Jakku is a major setting in The Force Awakens[4] and its novelization.[5][6] The home world of main character Rey, it is a harsh and inhospitable desert planet on the outskirts of the Unknown Regions.[7] In the film, ResistanceX-wing pilot Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac) comes to Jakku seeking vital information held by explorer Lor San Tekka (Max von Sydow).[8] Poe is captured by the oppressive First Order but leaves the data behind with his astromech droid, BB-8. He escapes with the help of turncoat stormtrooperFinn (John Boyega), but Poe is presumed dead when their stolen TIE fighter crashes in the desert. Meanwhile, BB-8 befriends local scavenger Rey; pursued by the First Order, she and Finn flee Jakku with the droid aboard the Millennium Falcon. Later in the film, Rey has a vision of being left on the planet as a child and being taken by Unkar Plutt after touching Luke Skywalker's old lightsaber.
The planet appears briefly in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (2019). Rey has a flashback-like vision of her parents leaving her on the planet before they were killed. The planet also appears in a montage alongside Bespin and Endor after the film’s climactic battle on Exegol between the Resistance and the Sith Eternal; a burning Resurgent-class Star Destroyer can be seen falling behind an old Imperial-class Star Destroyer (one shown in The Force Awakens) as the galaxy rises up against the First Order.
The scenes on Jakku were filmed in the UAE section of the Rub al Khali desert, which falls under the jurisdiction of the Emirate of Abu Dhabi.[9][10] In early concept development stages, the planet was conceived as a "junk planet" which would have "wreckage from the previous Star Wars movies".[11] Unused designs for Tatooine by original trilogy concept artist Ralph McQuarrie were repurposed for exteriors.[12] Some have criticized Jakku as being essentially the same planet as Tatooine, the home world of both Luke and Anakin Skywalker (from the original and prequel trilogy, respectively), with only its name being unique.[13]
Literature
Jakku was first introduced in two novels released on September 4, 2015: Chuck Wendig's Star Wars: Aftermath (2015) and Claudia Gray's Lost Stars. The latter depicts some of the Battle of Jakku, the final confrontation between the forces of the Galactic Empire and the New Republic over the planet.[1] The battle is also depicted in the final book in Wendig's Aftermath trilogy, Empire's End (2017),[14][15] which explains that Palpatine kept an observatory on the planet to map the Unknown Regions, overseen by Palpatine's own adoptive son and Jakku native Gallius Rax, where in the event of his death, the Empire would reform as the First Order.[16] The reference book The Force Awakens: The Visual Dictionary establishes that this battle occurs one year and four days after the Battle of Endor depicted in Return of the Jedi, and is the last major stand of the Empire and battle of the Galactic Civil War. 29 years later, around the time of The Force Awakens, the debris field in the desert is called the Starship Graveyard.[17]
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