Rogue One: A Star Wars Story Trailer Revealed
A heist movie in a galaxy far, far away, the first trailer for Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and it’s pretty great!
It certainly isn’t your Mom and Dad’s Star Wars film – everything is a little grimier, a little dirtier and the morals a little greyer that the usual black and white opposites of the Star Wars universe. But that’s not to say it isn’t Star Wars. In fact, you get all the Star Wars! The Death Star! Mon Mothma! The music – which is beautifully stripped down and thankfully absent of any Inception style ‘bwhhhas!’ – it feels familiar an d yet startlingly new.
It’s nice to have a Star Wars movie not focused on the Skywalker family yet totally feel a part of that universe. However, this isn’t George Lucas’ vision – everything here action focussed with a surprising amount of near hand-to-hand combat on show for what is usually a blasters and sabres kind of throw down.
After the stellar success of Star Wars: The Force Awakens, the universe has been expanded somewhat by the addition of the ‘A Star Wars Story’ banner. The first director leading that charge is Godzilla helmer Gareth Edwards.
The film takes place just before the events of 1977’s Star Wars, and focused on the team of Rebel Alliance grunts who stole the plans to the first Death Star, it features Felicity Jones, Mads Mikkelsen, Alan Tudyk, Be n Mendelshon, Forest Whitaker and Donnie Yen.
Focusing on Jyn Erso, a female Han Solo type with a penchant for one lines: “This is a rebellion, isn’t it? I rebel,” which is a perfect 50/50 of cool sounding but kind of clunky dialogue – the key difference seems to be is that she isn’t all wide-eyed and eager to learn, in fact she’s downright dangerous; easily taking down half a dozen or so Stormtroopers. We already know that those skills don’t come from the Force, so what in her past turned her against the Empire and where does that anger come from?
Then there’s the aforementioned Mon Mothma – who apparently has been in the cream-robed destroyer of giant space stations business way before her famous appearance in Return of the Jedi, where she reminded the council of just how many Bothans bit the big one. Answer: many. Whoever the actress is who plays her is eerily similar to original Mon, Caroline Blakiston.
While it appears that Forest Whitaker isn’t playing Darth Vader – although the black robed figure seen briefly kneeling in the trailer does look like Vader – he does appear to have a similar body suit to Vader. Without the Force to offer sage advice to our young hero, it seems that his character has been handed the duty of telling it like it is too. Our money is on him being some kind of Imperial sponsored bounty hunter, similar in fact to the hiring process of Boba Fett; maybe this speech is the last hurrah/prophecy of doom of a turncoat within the Rebels ranks?
Despite Grand Moff Tarkin being rumoured to have a hand in proceedings, instead we get a glimpse of Ben Mendelshon’s Imperial leader – who’s insignia looks decidedly different to Grand Moff’s, so could we be seeing the power behind the power; and does his offing path the way for Moff’s rise to power? Could we be seeing some political skulduggery within the Imperial ranks?
And then finally, there are the glorious AT-At walkers and Shadowtroopers (as the now defunct expanded media used to call them). The Walkers are still that heady mix of cool and impractical while the shadowtroopers look a little cheap but perhaps once we know the reason for the change of colour, maybe they’ll score higher on the cool-o-meter (the expanded universe points to everything from cloaking technology to Force-enabled troops, so really, all bets are off.)
Rogue One: A Star Wars Story is released worldwide on 16th December.
