Reviewed: Canary Wharf Station In Star Wars

By Londonist Last edited 87 months ago

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Reviewed: Canary Wharf Station In Star Wars

We clocked that new Star Wars prequel Rogue One was using the Canary Wharf Jubilee line tube station as a location at the start of the year. And now we've seen the movie we can report exactly how it figures into the story of a heist to snatch the blueprints of the nascent Death Star.

The first hour of the film is tubeless, and pretty dreary to be honest (essentially a symphony in beige), then things pick up in the last act... just as the tube platforms show up (coincidence? We think not).

The shiny steel and polished concrete of Norman Foster's sci-fi transport interchange has been relocated from the Isle of Dogs to an island in the tropics — the platform doubling up as the entrance to a military installation where the film's main baddie (played by Ben Mendelsohn) has stored the critical VHS which the 70s styled band of rebels — led by the miscast Felicity Jones — are after.

It all looks very nice; escalators and signs gussied up with retro high-tech cladding as stormtroopers charge back and forth as if Darth Vader has just announced Inspector Sands is in the building. It seems an odd location to incorporate however — it could all have been done much more easily in a studio. In a heavily self-referential film directed by London-based super-nerd Gareth Edwards, perhaps a bit of tube-spotting is par for the course. Just a shame then that there's not a bit more of it. A roundel announcing 'Baddie's Hideout' would have been nice.

Maybe there'll be more of the Jubilee line's lovely architecture in Rogue Two. We can imagine the Emperor flicking through a Metro as he descends the escalators in Westminster, or C3PO and R2D2 trying to get in the disabled lift at North Greenwich.

Last Updated 14 December 2016