“It is a period of civil war. Rebel spaceships, striking from a hidden base, have won their first victory against the evil Galactic Empire.” If that extract rings a bell, it should – it’s pulled from the opening crawl seen in A New Hope, one which features the narrative crux to Gareth Edwards’ imminent anthology movie, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.
For during that historic mission, Rebel operatives managed to obtain schematics for the Death Star, the Empire’s ultimate weapon capable of wiping out entire planets in the blink of an eye. At the forefront of said rebellion is Felicity Jones as Jyn Erso, a drifter who falls in line with the Alliance upon learning that her father, Galen Erso (Mads Mikkelsen), became involved in the Death Star’s construction.
And so, as Rogue One draws near, Entertainment Weekly has premiered an all-new image of Jones and Co. gearing up for battle. With Riz Ahemd’s Bodhi Rook and an X-Wing uniform in the background, we assume that this is pulled from around the mid-way point of Edwards’ blockbuster and here, the director speaks a little more about the inherent difficulties of crafting a prequel.
“The thing every [filmmaker] typically struggles with is ‘How does it end?’” says director Gareth Edwards (Godzilla). “But we knew how our film was going to end. Our problem became ‘How do we reverse engineer from that and know where to start?’ You’ve got a finite number of options and you go through them all like a puzzle to find the one that’s going to lead to the strongest result.”
Joining Jones for the galactic crusader are Diego Luna as Capt. Cassian Andor, and Alan Tudyk as former Imperial droid K-2SO. Ahmed, Jiang Wen, Donnie Yen, and Forest Whitaker also star.
Rogue One: A Star Wars Story is very, very close. How do we know? It seems the Galactic Empire is already beginning to roll out pieces of Imperial propaganda.