Rebellion! Stealing Death Star plans! Mon Mothma! Lucasfilm has released the first trailer for Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, and it looks dark and great—really bringing us into the pre-A New Hope Rebellion era, where the resistance leaders are getting desperate and need to know just what the Empire is building.
Enter Felicity Jones’ character, Jyn Erso, who seems to be your typical spitfire turned toward a noble cause. We don’t know much about Diego Luna or Forest Whitaker’s characters, though the latter gets a rousing speech toward the end of the trailer. And what’s with Jyn wearing Imperial clothes? Is this heist going to turn all Ocean’s Eleven with disguises, or should we be worried about something darker?
Here’s the official synopsis:
Following the foundation of the Galactic Empire, a wayward band of Rebel fighters comes together to carry out a desperate mission: to steal the plans for the Death Star before it can be used to enforce the Emperor’s rule.
Watch the trailer now:
Rogue One comes to theaters December 16.
Ahhhhhhhh!!!!!!! YES, that is my reaction. This looks amazing and I want now. :) This…looks like the kind of movie me and my sisters would come up with back in the day and I just texted them now(even though we’re all grown up and stuff!) to tell them to watch this now. I’m undeniably excited. And…just…YES.
That looks so much better than The Force Awakens. And I loved The Force Awakens. That preview, right there, is what I loved about the Legends EU. It introduced new kinds of stories to Star Wars while still retaining the distinct feel of Star Wars. If no more new stories in the old EU means I get movies like this every two years, and a new EU… I’ll take it. Gladly.
Okay, definitely caring now. Not sure yet how I feel about this mood being attached to a Star Wars movie, but I guess we went there in Episode III. And I definitely know how I feel about seeing all the old hallmarks again …
This looks AMAZING!!! As a SW fan I’ve always been more interested in the regular pilots and commandos than in jedi (though a Force user sprinkled in for good measure doesn’t hurt); and while I like the Skywalkers’ saga, I also like seeing the other things going on in the galaxy. It’s the roleplayer in me, this movie and the Rebels TV show are stuff straight out of roleplaying campaigns.
For those of you as excited as I am, here’s a website with an almost frame-by-frame (well, important frames) capture of the teaser, to pour over the details:
http://pulse.therpf.com/first-trailer-for-rogue-one-a-star-wars-story
I think it’s Jyn Erso… also, her conversation with Mon Mothma is like, the second one ever conversation between women in the Star Wars movies.
[sorry, double post]
I’m going to guess that many Bothans will die in this movie.
The spelling has been confirmed as Jyn Erso:
https://twitter.com/lizo_mzimba/status/718048721834000384
Not surprising, since “Arso” would sound kind of, err, cheeky to British audiences…
@6/Adam: No, the Bothans died to retrieve the plans for the second Death Star.
Oh, what is wrong with Tor.com’s software? Often I post a message, it shows as being uploaded, but it doesn’t actually appear in the comments until a subsequent comment is posted. Hopefully it will appear now…
Do we know who they cast as Mon Mothma? Just based on the trailer, it’s a pretty decent resemblance.
Part of me wishes/hopes it’s the actress who was Mon Mothma in the deleted scene in Revenge of the Sith.
@7 — Thanks for the heads-up. Yeah, it was difficult to parse; I had her as “Jin Asa” on first listen but was sure that wasn’t it…
@9
It is her!
http://imgur.com/a/1Unyh
@8 – Chris: The same happened to me, but refreshing after posting seems to help. I do wish they’d use a boards/forum software instead of a blog-style one. (There are sites such as BCBR that have the blog as front for readers, but once you move into the comments, it’s a boards style one.)
@11 — Excellent! I’m even more excited for this! Now they just need to also have Ian McDiarmid …
Mon Mothma!!! I really want to know who the others are – like, perhaps a young Dodonna or Tarkin somewhere???
Personally I love the mood and tone of it, I think it’s perfectly fitting for a side story of this type. It’s very possible I’ll enjoy this way more than TFA (which I have a love hate relationship with – it was a good movie but I can’t love/enjoy it) because it ostensibly isn’t going to completely break my heart and stomp all over my childhood dreams, haha.
@7, 10:
Cached content generally loads fine, but from time to time, database content doesn’t fully load.
If your web developer has the database on the same server as the web server, I would consider a distributed model, where the database and the web server are served by separate machines or virtual machines. In a community based website, the database needs a lot more power and speed than the codebase and web server do, because much of the information in the database can’t be cached; in other words, the page has to be built on the fly, in real-time, per request. This is why the articles sometimes load, but the comments do not, or take forever. The articles can be cached (they don’t change often), while the comments can’t be cached often, nor can the user pages that list our posts, etc. They need to be rebuilt on the fly per request. If you are getting thousands of requests, or even hundreds, at the same time, it can overload the database, because the server is also in many case, serving the images, the cached content, sending out emails and other things, all at the same time.
Getting the database on its own server frees up that server to ONLY serve database requests. It also frees up the web server to just compile the page with the info the database give it, it doesn’t ALSO have to process the request and serve the data.
@11 – YES!!!!! I was about to go look that up, because I REALLY RELALY wanted it to be her, and it looked so much like her.
OMG IAN MCDIARMID YES PLEASE. I didn’t even think about that? How could I have not thought about that?
@7 – hah, I was going to say the same thing about the Bothans.
@14,
Pretty sure Tarkin is the old dude with the cape. This takes place pretty close to A New Hope, at least parts of it do. Her mission is to steal the plans that Leia delivers to the Rebel Alliance. We may even see Leia in this movie, in a cameo. I wonder who they would have play her? Carrie Fisher’s daughter?
I also heard a roumor that Gary Fisher would play a young nephew of Chewbacca.
I didn’t really get a Tarkin vibe from White Cape Guy, but I certainly could be wrong.
And at the risk of being branded a heretic and run out of town on a rail, I wouldn’t mind if they had at least a few callbacks to the prequels — maybe a few scenes on Coruscant or something? Just no Gungans, please.
@17
Tarkin was a Grand Moff. The dude in the cape (Ben Mendelsohn) is wearing white, which signifies a Grand Admiral. I have no doubt that Tarkin will be in it, but it ain’t that dude.
It is spelled “Jyn Erso.”
Confirmed by Entertainment Weekly and several others.
*Resumes hyperventilating*
THERE’S ANOTHER STAR WARS MOVIE! WITH MON MOTHMA! AND CAPES! AND OTHER STUFF!
I also was wondering if the cape guy was Tarkin, but ultimately decided against it.
Heh, they could get the RotS guy for that too. Although to be fair, we really didn’t get to see him to much acting (unlike RotS which had the Mon Mothma actress in several scenes), and Tarkin especially would require a certain air and way of speaking.
AGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH. I’m going to watch this way too many times today at work.
@19, 20, 22:
Good point. If he’s a grand admiral, he’s not named Thrawn, so I have no idea who he is. None of the guys we met in the original trilogy were Grand Admirals.
Also, are we sure that cape signifies Grand Admiral, now? There haven’t been any Imperial Grand Admirals on screen. Was there a Grand Admiral in the book Tarkin? Perhaps a rival of Tarkin’s? Was there a Grand Admiral in a comic in the past 2 years, or on Rebels?
The guy playing Tarkin in RotS was mostly makeup. He looks nothing like Peter Cushing: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0701460/
Wasn’t there a rumor or story that they were trying to recreate Peter Cushing digitally (voice and all) , and his heirs were threatening a lawsuit? That could work if they just had him in a hologram.
@22&24: The actor who played Tarkin in ROTS was Wayne Pygram, who’s best known as the recurring villain Scorpius from Farscape, who did indeed have much the same “air and way of speaking” as Tarkin, a debonair persona with genuine menace underneath. I think he’d be a fine choice for Tarkin, regardless of physical resemblance.
Amazing.
@14 – Lisamarie: We still don’t know who Mads Mikkelsen is playing, could be Tarkin.
@21 – Random: YES! CAPES!
@24 – Anthony: It’s not the cape that signifies Grand Admiral, it’s the white uniform. Of course, that’s a Legends thing, so he could be something else. But I doubt he’s Tarkin.
There’s a Grand Admiral in Aftermath, but we don’t know who he is, or anything about him.
I assumed (entirely without any supporting evidence from any source whatsoever) that Mads Mikkelsen would be playing a young Lor San Tekka (Max von Sydow in Force Awakens).
Tarkin never struck me as a cape-wearing sort of dude.
@28 – Random: No, the only Grand Admiral in Aftermath is not Imperial, as it’s Ackbar:
http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Grand_Admiral
I hope Cape Guy is an unfinished FX shot and they still have blue skin tones to add in digitally.
The trailer looks good but I can’t get out of my head the thought reminding me that the trailer for Godzilla 2014 looked awesome too, yet the movie was a crashing bore and the trailer a mess of lies. The director has screwed with me before, so I’m almost certainly not going to be going to see it on opening weekend, I’ll wait for the midweek reviews afterwards to make my decision.
Appears promising. The only thing that worries me is the director, Gareth Edwards, and the possible lack of humor and fun. I’ve been to funerals that were more light and cheerful than his Godzilla.
Let the fun flow through you, Mr. Edwards. Don’t let Star Wars go the way of Superman.
Tarkin will be CGId into this movie, FYI
And yes, cool on them forgetting the prequel Mon Mothma back!
Mads must be the guy kneeling the black cape
“This is the rebellion, isn’t it? I rebel.”
Am I the only one who has issues with the dialogue and the way it’s being presented? The character, her delivery, her lines. It doesn’t remotely feel like Star Wars. It feels way too serious, and any attempts at humor feel woefully out of place.
Granted, the trailer looks good. The scale, the action, the visual effects. But this character doesn’t feel nearly as interesting as Rey. She feels like a token hollywood action hero.
@31/32: I haven’t seen Edward’s Godzilla, but remember that Star Wars is now helmed by producer Kathleen Kennedy, and she seems to be guiding the franchise.
@34 – Eduardo: Did all previous Star Wars trailers have humor? I don’t think so. Also, was Rey really interesting in the TFA teaser?
There was a guy in a white uniform in the original Death Star conference room scene, so it could be that guy.
@35: In the first TFA teaser, Rey didn’t have any dialogue. That helped. Her brief appearance suggested a strong, but vulnerable heroic character (and rather reminiscent of Natalie Portman).
That’s not how this Rogue One protagonist came across. It’s hard to pin down what irks me in the character, but she doesn’t feel “innocent” enough, in terms of being a Star Wars character. She feels like Fast & Furious character, rather than someone like Leia, Padmé or Rey. On the other hand, O’Reilly nailed Mon Mothma.
And at the risk of being branded a heretic and run out of town on a rail, I wouldn’t mind if they had at least a few callbacks to the prequels — maybe a few scenes on Coruscant or something?
@19: Hardly heretic. There should be callbacks. The Empire’s seat of power is in Coruscant. The only reason we didn’t get to see it in the Original Trilogy was lack of budget and limited visual effects capacity. They have no excuse to avoid Coruscant now. At least Force Awakens had that brief glimpse of Hosnian Prime, which sort of resembled Coruscant.
@34 – well, I think the line itself is stupid in that rebelling for the sake of rebelling is dumb (in my opinion). But my guess is that part of the point of this movie will be her realizing that and truly rebelling for a cause and finding a channel for that energy.
Anyway, even if this movie doesn’t end up perfectly matching the tone/style I’m more or less okay with this as this is a side story – there’s a pretty big variation of genre/tone in the Legends EU and that’s part of what was fun about it.
“Innocent”? Han Solo and Chewie are a criminals! :)
@39 – ha, I was going to say the same thing.
Also, I could kind of see Leia being a bit of a spitfire without the proper direction/focus…
Definitely, particularly with the pull of the Dark Side (she is Force sensitive).
What I mean by innocent is that this doesn’t feel like a movie I’d take my kids to see. I’m not getting a sense of fun. Feels too grim. Doesn’t feel enough like a whimsical fairytale (not an alien in sight). Then again, I guess that’s the point of having spinoff films.
Many Bothans died for the Death Star 2.0 plans right?
Well, we don’t know that many Bothans didn’t die for the Death Star 1.0 plans …
I like the rebel boss’s face after “I rebel”. She’s thinking sadly “well, at least we have some suicide missions on the books…”
@42, well TFA already burst that bubble. We didn’t take our kids, and I know one family who did and had to leave within 5 minutes. (Our kids are 5 year olds -well, 4 at the time – so I get that’s not QUITE the same thing – but they have no problems with the originals and I don’t have any qualms about showing them to them).
I can kind of see why they made the decision to make RotS PG-13 (although part of me wishes they hadn’t) as the story is inherently going to be the darkest one, but I wish they hadn’t started the new trilogy off that way. But obviously millions upon millions of dollars disagree with me, so that’s probably the tone the movies are going to take going forward.
@28: I think @30 is referring to the unnamed Imperial admiral who shows up at the very end of Aftermath.
But he isn’t identified as a Grand Admiral, so we can’t say a Grand Admiral appeared ,or even that the title exists in the Empire in canon.
Good point. I couldn’t recall if they gave him a title, but just wanted to acknowledge that’s who @28 was referring to. He may or may not be a Grand Admiral. At this point they are both unnamed Imperial big wigs who may or may not be the same person. It’s fun to speculate!
Woohoo!
Looks like fun! I sure wish there were some alien rebels in the group though.
@33:
Can you send a link with confirmation on that, Aeryl? I’m not finding anything current, and there was a lawsuit in progress, and I’m not finding any resolution articles on that either.
Yeah, I am ALL about this movie! Saw something about negative “another female lead” comments being tossed around on Twitter and such, which just boggles my mind. This looks AWESOME! I’ve already scheduled off of work so that I can hit the midnight showings!
I wish there non-humans on the cast too, but perhaps they’re saving them for later. (Come to think about it, it’s bad that none of the three new main characters in the sequel trilogy is an alien…)
@35 True. And Kennedy did do a good job of yank JJ Abram’s leash to ensure we got a watchable movie out of him for once, but that is just one movie. One movie isn’t enough to build a rep on, especially when Godzilla 2014 was just so horrible in the way it mislead and mistreated the audience. If this does turn out good, despite who they hired to direct (and it will be despite not because) then she’ll have a rep to take to the bank. Lets get through this one minefield first.
Of course, she has to prove herself. But the way she says things in interviews, the way you can see they’re shaping everything, etc, that gives me hope.
@54:
It could mean that the aliens are mocapped, and they just aren’t done with the CGI. The fact that Abrams chose to include so many aliens in rubber costumes doesn’t meant that other directors will.
The movies don’t always turn out this serious, but why are almost all movie trailers this serious now? It’s almost a Buddhist meditation on movie trailers.
They have a huge catalog of exciting John Williams music to reuse, and yet again they go with sensitive Lifetime movie-of-the-week piano noodling? I don’t get it. Trailers should get you excited. Not just a little excited to see iconic shoutouts like an AT-AT and the Death Star, but bursting—BURSTING!—to see this movie.
@46
Star Wars being scary for kids isn’t really that new — it just depends on the kids. I was 7 when ROTJ came out and was totally freaked out by the Emperor as well as by Vader when Luke removed his helmet.
MON MOTHMA!!!!
@36: Yularen was one of my first thoughts regarding White Cape Dude too, but I can’t tell if he looks enough like the guy in ANH. But my guess is they are probably going a different routed for that character.
As for tone, I’m more or less ok with side movies moving away a little bit, but it is just a little saddening that this seems to be going in the same direction as Force Awakens in general.
Some parts of this definitely had me thinking that it would make fans of the video games pretty happy. But other parts of it do look pretty cool. So we’ll see, I guess.
@58/HiWayCafe: I don’t get it when people get up in arms about a single trailer. No movie these days has just one trailer. It has a whole campaign of multiple trailers, each designed to present a different tone. The goal of the marketing agencies that create movie trailers is to appeal to a range of different audiences, so they make different trailers that spin the film in different ways. You might have a more serious trailer followed later by a trailer with more humor, or an action-heavy trailer followed by a more plot-revealing trailer. Because each trailer is just one piece of a larger campaign, each one is designed to present a different facet of the film — although there are regrettably many cases where the final trailer gives away most of the plot.
In any case, this is the teaser trailer. It’s just the beginning of the ad campaign. It’s the appetizer, not the meal.
@Earlier discussion of my comment
Yeah, I meant that guy, and was under the impression that early publicity material for Aftermath: Life Debt had established his rank more specifically. I can’t immediately find the specific reference (though the “Unidentified…” Page for the guy on wookiepedia does actually say Grand Admiral at the moment).
Regardless, still excited for this film, though I agree with @46 and others about the content and tone of the film’s, at least conceptually.
Though I think this film might have more humour than some people expect, considering people leveled this same complaint at the TFA trailers as well.
#61 ChristopherLBennett: I wasn’t talking about just this trailer. I was referring to the trend in many trailers that make their movies look needlessly dark and serious. It’s misleading in some cases and more than a little pretentious across the board.
An odd trend. Are some studios and their marketing departments ashamed to make something appear colorful and fun, even though their property is rooted in that very tone? It reminds me of an overly sullen teenager who wants to be taken seriously as an adult, even though they still enjoy playing with toys when no one is looking. (I say this with experience.)
And of course this is the first teaser, but first impressions still count. If the appetizer is flat and lifeless, it doesn’t instill confidence in the kitchen—despite there being different cooks.
Given the theme of the movie will be a sort of espionage/heist, and given that old info had the guy in white in the DS conference room as an ISB officer, maybe the guy in white in this trailer is another (or even the same) ISB officer, trying to keep the secret of the Empire’s new superweapon from being revealed to the galaxy before it’s ready to be unleashed.
@63/HiWayCafe: As I said, the marketing firms that make trailers have a formula that puts different trailers into different categories, including the solemn/serious type, the joke-heavy type, the give-away-the-entire-plot type, etc. So it’s true that a lot of trailers fit a common pattern, but they don’t all fit the same pattern. They don’t always make a fun movie look more serious. For instance, there’s that story making the rounds this past week that Suicide Squad is going in for reshoots because its wildly popular trailer was much funnier than the film overall, so they’re trying to add more humor to the actual film to make it more like the trailer. (Or so a source has alleged, at least. I gather there’s some doubt about its reliability.)
The problem is, although the movies are made by a lot of different filmmakers and studios, most major trailers today are the work of a very small number of firms that specialize in trailers, and that’s why they tend to resemble each other.
Yes, blue skin and red glowing eyes
I do hope we get more aliens
She’s a chick Han. I proposed Jennifer Lawrence for the Han Solo prequel, so I don’t really have a problem with this.
I’d like this to make the universe bigger
I saw ROTJ when I was four and loved it. I probably wouldn’t take my four year old(if I still had one) to the theater though, better to watch at home
@Anthony Pero, the last time I read it was Aug 2015 and it was in the Daily Fail
I really hope that it’s a Grand Admiral. I feel like it would be a good shout out to the old EU.
@57 – Anthony: The problem is not that there aren’t any aliens (of course there will be aliens, this is Star Wars), the problem is that there aren’t any aliens on the team. CGI or not, we’ve had the picture of the team for months now, and, while they can still surprise us, I think they would have included an alien member in it if there was one.
Then again, if they are sneaking into an Imperial installation, being able to pass for Imperial officers if necessary is a bonus. But still, I’d rather there were aliens in the team.
@60 – crzydroid: No, the guy in the white cape doesn’t look the same as the guy in ANH.
@64 – Porphyrogenitus: I think all that ISB stuff is from now non-canon sources, so I wouldn’t count on it.
If it was up to me, I’d be tempted to mine the EU for specific items (particular ship designs or described aliens; a white uniform with a cape and 10 pips; etc.) and use them in the new movies for something completely unrelated.
Probably just as well it’s not up to me.
Just to clarify – I don’t have a problem with the tone of THIS movie (in fact, it didn’t really strike me as particularly dark at all). And I have mixed feelings about TFA’s tone although I was a little sad we couldn’t take our son to see it (we might show it to him on DVD but skip over some of the more intense parts. Still have no idea if I want to reveal to him that Han dies…). I guess we’ll just save his first theater movie for one of the later episodes :).
@69 – I think it would be cool to throw in some Easter Eggs like that, but what I would NOT want to see (basically because it would make me eye twitchy) is to do something like repurpose an existing name/design and then call it something totally different. Either divorce yourself from the old Legends stuff, or use it, but don’t try to have your foot in both doors. (Is that even an expression). So, I don’t really want to see a Thrawn lookalike in this movie, at least not as a main character. Then again, maybe it would be kind of fun to see one in the background somewhere…
@25 CLB – oh, well in that case, that would be pretty awesome :)
From too much time spent in the West End Games Star Wars RPG, I can say that white uniforms were worn by Imperial Security Bureau (ISB) officers as well as Grand Admirals. Not that details like that are set in stone, but if Rogue One is going to be something of a heist movie, having a high-ranking security officer as the (a) Big Bad would make a certain sense.
One last loony theory thought – in one of the scenes there is a somewhat dashing/swaggery guy in a jacket in the Rebel base. A friend of mine mentioned that it kind of reminded her of Han (although she knows he would not be anywhere near the Rebellion at this time). My first thought when I saw it had actually been that it reminded me of Poe (obviously also not around or even alive during this time) but – knowing that his backstory involves two Rebel parents who ultimately settled on Yavin 4 (so weird to think of it as a place OTHER than Luke’s Jedi Academy, sigh), I wonder if it’s his dad or if his parents could otherwise make an appearance. Does the established canon say one way or another if they were involved in the Rebellion at that time?
@70 — Yeah, I’d only do that (repurpose existing EU elements) if I was trying to be jerkish.
Actually, Easter egg-wise, what I’d like more than anything is to introduce some elements that would recanonize the Knights of the Old Republic games and books. (I understand Rebels may have done a bit of this by visiting Malachor in a recent episode?)
@72 possibly Jyn Erso and dashing/swaggers guy are Poes parents? Seems as likely a theory as any – and IMHO it definitely a better theory than that they are Rey’s parents.
@72/Lisamarie: Apparently Poe’s parents Shara Bey and Kes Dameron are featured in the Shattered Empire comics miniseries, set after ROTJ. Apparently they were with the Rebellion by the Battle of Hoth (the start of TESB), and Poe was born a year and a half before then. The writer Greg Rucka intended that they didn’t join the Rebellion until after the Battle of Yavin, so they wouldn’t have been members yet as of Rogue One, but that part didn’t get into the comic, so it’s subject to change (and frankly I’m sure the movies wouldn’t hesitate to contradict a comic book despite any pretense of keeping everything canonical, because they never did before).
http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Shara_Bey#Behind_the_scenes
@74/larvos: I think the fact that these guys stole the Death Star plans is more than enough to tie them into continuity without needing them to be anyone’s parents. I mean, this movie is basically the dramatization of the first two paragraphs of the Episode IV opening crawl. What more do we need?
@75 – yeah, I did some googling and I did find an article more or less summarizing the series, but then it also said that Kes and Shara were part of the battle against the Death Star at Yavin. However, it was a more mainstream article so I was wondering if they perhaps got confused about which Death Star battle it was.
I probably should have just gone with the Star Wars wiki ;)
I don’t think they’ll be anyone’s parents or relatives, though there’s rumors (fan rumors) that Diego Luna’s character (the jacket-wearing Han-Soloish character in the trailer) could be Biggs.
I’m just thrown by how similar the name “Shara Bey” is to Shira Brie from the ’80s Marvel Star Wars comics. That’s confusing.
Also, Jyn Erso is similar to Jan Ors. There are several Star Wars names very similar to others, they pop up from time to time.
Never heard of Jan Ors.
Hmm… given its structural similarity to “Han Solo,” could “Jyn Erso” be a Corellian name?
It’s quite possible, but other names in the books and comics have followed similar structures and turned out not to be Corellian; as well as Corellian names such as Corran Horn or Soontir Fel.
@80: Jan Ors is a rebel alliance character from the Jedi Knight computer FPS series. She assists Kyle Katarn in his missions. Of these games, I’m actually playing through Jedi Outcast for the first time. Currently midway through the adventure.
Edwards is a huge Star Wars fan and an avid first person shooter gamer. The previous director attached to the project said it would be very similar to Dark Forces on-screen. A main character’s name is Jyn Erso, a young female hotshot pilot and scoundrel. A main character in Dark Forces is Jan Ors, a young female hothead, some-what scoundrel.
Another main character in Dark Forces is Kyle Katarn, a young, somewhat scruffy-looking brown-haired Alliance military man. Sound familiar.
While there is no way this will be Dark Forces on screen, or that his name will be Kyle Katarn, its maybe at least somewhat likely that Rogue One was built upon the bones of Dark Forces.
Calling it: There will be a character named Karn Katyle.