The first Rogue One trailer was enough to intrigue Star Wars fans. But the latest footage, released Friday, was enough to give at least this fan full-body chills.
This year’s Star Wars Celebration — an annual fan event since 1999, this year in London — included a special clips package for Rogue One, the standalone prequel to the very first Star Wars movie (1977’s A New Hope) that will be released on December 16.
Rogue One, which follows Felicity Jones’s Jyn Erso as she and a group of rebels work to steal blueprints for the Death Star, is highly anticipated, especially since the movie’s very concept comes from a line in A New Hope’s famous opening crawl:
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From the looks of this new footage, revealed in between glowing sound bites from director Gareth Edwards, Rogue One will be quite different from the other Star Wars movies we’ve come to know so well.
Where The Force Awakens was scrappy, Rogue One looks to be going for something sleeker. Jyn and her fellow spies might exist a little more around the edges of the rebellion than smack in the middle of it, as we’ve largely seen in Star Wars films with protagonists like Luke, Leia, and Han, or Rey, Finn, and Poe.
Rogue One will also bring us to new worlds within the Star Wars universe, as evidenced by this pretty startling — and pretty awesome — shot of Stormtroopers marching through a turquoise sea.
We’ll meet a whole new assortment of characters, human and alien and everything in between.
We’ll have a whole new piece of the Star Wars origin story puzzle.
So even if we know how Rogue One ends — with Jyn and company stealing the Death Star plans and delivering them to the Rebel Alliance — watching the "how" of it all should be one hell of a ride.
Rogue One comes out in US theaters on December 16.
