Earlier today, we learnt that Disney was planning to release a brand new trailer for Gareth Edwards’ Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, a smart move considering all the negative press the film has been receiving lately, due to the trouble it’s been having on set.
The footage will arrive on Thursday, and ahead of its debut, the studio has dropped a batch of hi-res images online. These are identical to the ones that EW premiered not too long ago, only without the watermark and better quality. So, nothing new then, but they should be enough to tide us over for a few days as we eagerly await the new trailer.
After all, the photos offer up a good look at most of the film’s characters, giving us a couple of pretty cool shots in the process. There’s still a lot we don’t know about Rogue One, and while there is cause for concern given what we’ve been hearing about the reshoots, we’d be lying if we said we weren’t at least intrigued to see what’s been cooked up here.
In related news, we know that Rogue One will expand the Star Wars universe in a big way, as it’s set to not only introduce new characters, but new worlds as well. One of those will be Jedha, and in an interview with EW, Edwards revealed a bit of information about it.
“It’s a place where people who believe in the Force would go on a pilgrimage. It was essentially taken over by the Empire. It’s an occupied territory…for reasons we probably can’t reveal…There’s something very important in Jedha that serves both the Jedi and the Empire. It felt very much like something we could relate to in the real world.
Further in the interview, Edwards touched on why the film’s characters end up there:
Within Jedha, even though there’s the oppressive foot of the Empire hanging over them, there’s a resistance that won’t give up and our characters have to go and meet people there to try and secure a person from this group.”
Finally, the director spoke about how the idea for the planet came about from the fact that people are losing faith in The Force:
“The Force is basically in Star Wars like a religion, and they’re losing their faith in the period that we start the movie. We were trying to find a physical location we could go to that would speak to the themes of losing your faith and the choice between letting the Empire win, or evil win, and good prevailing. It got embodied in this place we called Jedha.”
Rogue One: A Star Wars Story will hit theaters on December 16 and stars Felicity Jones,Diego Luna, Ben Mendelsohn, Donnie Yen, Jiang Wen, Mads Mikkelsen, Alan Tudyk, Riz Ahmed, and Forest Whitaker.
