Star Wars: Rogue One
Update: The first teaser trailer for Star Wars: Rogue One drops Thursday, April 7. It will be broadcast during Good Morning America in the US, then likely land on YouTube shortly after. A teaser preview landed Wednesday afternoon and gives us our first look at the new, darker side of Star Wars.
Star Wars: Rogue One is the next movie to hit our screens from a long time ago and a galaxy far, far away. Its full title is actually Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, but that’s so lame it makes Tiny Tim look like a varsity athlete.
It’s the first live action movie to depart from the traditional episodic nature of the rest of the Star Wars movies, and an almost complete departure from the fan-favourite characters the rest of the films follow.
What’s interesting about these Star Wars ‘anthology’ movies is that they will be standalone counterpoints between the episodic releases of the main story, and won’t really be set around the Jedi or the struggle between the light and dark sides of the Force.
Rogue One in particular is being talked about in shades of grey, with a darker, grittier tone than we might have seen from any Star Wars property before.
Rogue One is also going to be set out of chronological order, potentially confusing a whole bunch of folk expecting to see the sequel to The Force Awakens, and will pre-date the very first Star Wars movie, A New Hope.
So, what do we know about Star Wars: Rogue One so far?
Star Wars: Rogue One release date
The most important news is exactly when we can expect to see the new movie: it’s going to be around one year after The Force Awakens premiered, and will be in cinemas on December 16, 2016.
Filming is apparently “virtually completed” according to Disney CEO Bob Iger, who added that he and his colleagues “absolutely love what we’ve seen so far”.
However, there have also been reports that the script was still being reworked as shooting was going on, with Christopher McQuarrie (The Usual Suspects) being brought in as an uncredited ‘script doctor’ to finish things up.
Star Wars: Rogue One cast and crew
Helming the project is Monsters and Godzilla director, Gareth Edwards. In terms of the actors we’re looking at more of an ensemble piece than with the episodic movies. The main cast is made up of Felicity Jones, Riz Ahmed, Diego Luma, Mads Mikkelson, Donnie Yen, Forest Whitaker, Wen Jiang, Alan Tudyk and Ben Mendelsohn.
What we don’t know though is what characters they’ll be playing as the story and plot details have been kept very close to Lucasfilm chests. Riz Ahmed’s bio-page detailed his character’s name as Bodhi Rook, but that doesn’t really tell us a lot…
Scottish model, Eunice Olumide, has recently announced a small role in the movie though as a rebel leader. It’s so small that she doesn’t have any lines and reportedly spends her screen time running away from a tank and 20 Stormtroopers.
Star Wars: Rogue One story
This is where things get even more vague… All we know for sure so far is that the events of Star Wars: Rogue One occur sometime in between the Star Wars: Rebels cartoon show and A New Hope, and feature a rogue band of resistance fighters formed together by the Rebellion to steal the plans of the very first Death Star.
It’s the story which the first movie glossed over, only showing us the end of the trail where the full technical readout of the station is in the hands of Princess Leia and then hidden in a certain devious R2 unit.
Star Wars: Rogue One rumours
Inevitably there’s a fair few rumours flying around about what exactly is going to be going on in Rogue One, but the one which makes the most sense surrounds who the main characters might be.
There’s a chance that Mads Mikkelson is playing an Oppenheimer-like scientist who was partially responsible for the creation of the Death Star, or at least fixing crucial flaws in its design, and is now having a bit of a crisis of confidence. From the name you’d probably guess that maybe the hyper-powerful planet-destroying space station you’d helped create wasn’t going to become a force for galactic good.
Anyways, Mads (potentially named Galen in the movie) defects from the Empire and enlists his daughter to help protect the galaxy from the danger he has engineered. That daughter could well be the Felicity Jones character.
That sounds like a plausible rumour and has been reported from various sources.
Ground war
From what we’ve heard about the movie it sounds like it will focus more on the ground war of the conflict with the Empire than the X-Wing vs. TIE fighter stuff we’ve seen before. Rumours state that this means we’ll also get to see Darth Vader plying his nefarious trade on the battlefield, with some offering it as really the first time we’ll actually see the terrible power and violence of Vader, wrought on rebel troops.
This would tally with the report from Eunice Olumide, about a sequence with tanks and Stormtroopers.
And with IMDB listing a character as a ‘religious warrior’ we may even see Vader taking out some of his frustration on some Jedi that aren’t as good at hiding as Mr. Kenobi…
Another rumour, which spawned from a LEGO event at the Nuremberg Toy Fair of all places, has an image which looks like a version of the Slave One set in a bubble tagged with the Rogue One name.
Could everyone’s favourite bounty hunter, Boba Fett, be making an appearance in Rogue One? It wouldn’t surprise us to see some crossover with key characters from the episodic movies kept in to remind people that this is still a Star Wars movie.
With Vader and Boba Fett potentially appearing, who else might make a cameo?
Star Wars: Rogue One trailers
There still has yet to be even a teaser trailer dropped for Rogue One as yet. Even Episode VIII has already had a teaser…
It has been suggested that maybe a full trailer will be released along with the new Captain America: Civil War movie comes out in April. Fingers crossed then we’ll start to see footage rolling out to match what we saw from The Force Awakens last year before it released.
There was a brief teaser shown at the Star Wars Celebration, with director Gareth Edwards also taking to the stage to explain that “I couldn’t sit in a cinema and know that someone else made this film.”
Though any online copies of that teaser have long since been removed.
Rogue One: A Star Wars Story is set for general release on December 16, 2016.
Source: techradar.com
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I'm going to be honest, but my favourite bounty hunter has to be Cad Bane from The Clone Wars.