I’ve been super stoked for Gareth Edwards‘ war and espionage addition to the Star Wars universeâRogue One: A Star Wars Story, of courseâfor awhile now (in fact, I wrote a whole treatise on why you should be too), but one thing we’ve seen decidedly little of thus far in the trailers and promos has been the actual spy mission that results in (*SPOILERS*) Princess Leia getting the Death Star plans. In a new featurette (above), you get to see a lot more of the Dirty Dozen-esque plot, along with great context for the movie itself.
As director Edwards says, the whole of Rogue One was alluded to in the opening crawl of A New Hope, about Rebel spies scoring their first victory. In keeping with that, we get to see Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones) in an Imperial gunner uniformâthe same we’ve seen in other trailers, just now with more contextâand her cohort Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) in an Imperial officer’s uniform walking down the corridor of the Death Star with their reformed Imperial droid K-2SO (Alan Tudyk). This lets us know what the spying actually looks like, and how it will go down. I’m envisioning several tense moments with them about to be caught. Maybe some of them do. After all, only one of them needs to deliver the plans.
In addition, we get more of that great shot-on-set footage with deeper looks at the amazingly well-designed Imperial troopers and new droids and more focus on the base on Yavin 4, which has to look as close as possible to how it looked in A New Hope. This will be an interesting experiment; we’ve yet to have a Star Wars movie set so close in chronology to another film, something which will evidently happen again with Episode VIII in 2017.
Let us know your excitement level for Erso. Jyn Erso. And the other Rebel spies, in the comments below!
Image: Lucasfilm
Kyle Anderson is the Associate Editor for Nerdist and a sci-fi fan extraordinaire. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Twitter!