I took my 95-year old father-in-law to the last Star Wars movie The Force Awakens. This flick was notorious for the studio-enforced slimming down of Carrie Fisher (Princess/General Leia) and Mark Hamill (Luke Skywalker). These on-screen sibs had put on a pound or two since their youthful exploits when they saved their corner of the universe (blowing up the Empire’s “Death Star,” yaay!!!). Actually they both looked great in the movie — 38 years on — although I wish the studio had just let them play themselves, extra poundage and all, instead of insisting on some PC vision of acceptable weight.

Frame grab from The Force Awakens (Fair use)

At 59 years old, I think Carrie is beautiful, anytime, anyhow. Complaining about the demand from Lucasfilm to lose 35 pounds for her reprise role, she told Good Housekeeping (UK), “They don’t want to hire all of me – only about three-quarters!…I’m in a business where the only thing that matters is weight and appearance. That is so messed up.”

Frame grab from The Force Awakens (Fair use)

And Mark — whom we barely saw, and then only in the closing couple of minutes of the movie, bearded and enrobed — is one of those actors who you get the feeling just doesn’t care a whole lot what you think of him, he’s there to have a good time. Reminds me of Harrison Ford.

As I say, you only see Mark/Luke right at the end, and the question in my mind didn’t have anything to do with the plot, characters or weight. It was, “Where?” I thought knew the place from photographs: a steep grassy island with even steeper ancient stone steps. It was only when we were in the little Irish village of Portmagee last week, on the tip of the Iveragh Peninsula in County Kerry, that the shoe dropped, prompted by the “May the Force Be With You” sign over a pub on the other side of the road from the boat dock.

Frame grab from end of The Force Awakens (Fair use)

We were in Portmagee about to embark on a little boat to take the hour-long trip to Skellig Michael, best known of the remote monasteries founded in the furthest reaches of western Ireland around 600 AD. And of course, as I finally realized, the super-photogenic climax of The Force Awakens was filmed on the island, in 2014. And we were heading there, on the last day of the year that visitors could go there, governed by both the weather (we got drenched in the rough seas going and coming) and the Office of Public Works (the body responsible for maintaining the little island to the requirements of its UNESCO World Heritage status).

Skellig Michael (Barry Evans)

600 steps up to the monastery (Barry Evans)

At ten visitors per boat, six boats, sixty of us walked and scrambled up the 600 steps from the primitive dock to the monastery near the top of Skellig Michael. “Where’s the monastery?” asked one of us, to the OPW guide. “You’re standing in it!” Basically, five drystone corbel-constructed beehive-shaped cells, and a larger beehive structure, their “church,” where the usual complement of around 12 monks could join for prayer. For 600 years, until around 1200, these old boys toughed it out on one of the remotest locations ever. We thought just getting there was quite an adventure—we could only marvel how it must have been for guys rowing the seven miles from the mainland. I hope they got the same kick out of dolphins leaping — breathing, that is — as we did.

The Skellig Michael monastery (Barry Evans)

The Lucasfilm Star Wars crew were back recently for the next, eighth, chapter of the Star Wars saga, which presumably picks up where the last one left off, on the island. Despite all the tourist trade the movie location has attracted, filming wasn’t without controversy. The second guide we met was particularly critical of how the strict guidelines designed to guard the ruins and, especially, the nesting sea bird population, had been violated numerous times by the crew. In an interview with the Irish Times, she said, “some necessary protections no longer seem secure,” citing concerns for fledgling puffins and storm petrels, and structural damage to an 1,000-year-old archway. Such is, apparently, the cost of making a hit movie. (How much of a hit? $2 billion worldwide.)

Skellig Michael (as in Archangel Michael) lies half a mile northwest of its smaller and lower neighbor, Little Skellig. We passed by that rocky prominence on our rock ‘n’ roll trip home. No monks, no guides, no boats, no nothing there—just birds, including around 10,000 northern gannets.

Little Skellig (Barry Evans)

Gannets by the truckload (Barry Evans)

So what did my father-in-law think of the movie? “It was a bit complicated for me” — not surprising since this was the first of the seven Star Wars flicks he’d seen. “I think I’ll just stick to the Weather Channel on TV. Much easier to understand!”

The Skelligs from the Dingle peninsula (Barry Evans)