The Rebel Alliance is starting to take shape. Senator Mon Mothma and her allies are gathering political backing in the Galactic Senate, whilst Luthen Rael is getting his hands dirty with scheming and planning. The Empire itself is working in secret on a project of tremendous scale, requiring immense resources, including the strip-mining of the planet Ghorman, which becomes an early flashpoint in this struggle. Rebel operative Cassian Andor finds himself drawn back into Luthen's schemes, as he charts his course towards his ultimate fate.
The first season of Star Wars: Andor was a surprise, an adult and intelligent take on the Star Wars mythos that emphasised intelligent characters, interesting storytelling and a vibe that was more 1970s thriller than colourful space opera. "Star Wars as a premium HBO show from their golden age," was a common description. It was also designed to set up a planned five-year arc. Due to variable streaming figures, a significant budget and an immense production timeline, showrunner Tony Gilroy and star Diego Luna agreed to wrap the show up with the second season instead.
Compressing four seasons of television into one is a tough job, but here Gilroy and his writers make a virtue of it. The twelve-episode season (and it's an unalloyed joy to have a decent-length season of television again) is divided into four arcs of three episodes each, effectively meaning four movies back-to-back getting us from the end of the first season to the events of Rogue One. The result is focused and disciplined, with us seeing four important snapshots showing the evolution of the Galactic Empire into a fully repressive fascist state, and the Rebel Alliance into a viable military threat.
There's so much going on in Andor between these four arcs that it can be hard to pare it down. We have Cassian and Bix's domestic life, constantly interrupted by missions for Luthen. There's Luthen and Kleya's intelligence operations (Elizabeth Dulau emerges as the season's MVP, especially in the closing episodes), and Mon Mothma's politicking in the Senate. There's internal politics as the Imperial Security Bureau. There's the slowly-gathering rebels on Ghorman, who don't have a clue about what they're doing. There's Director Krennic (Ben Mendelsohn chewing the scenery with aplomb) throwing around his authority to get his secret project made. But the show moves between these different storylines with skill. There's also little filler or flab. To quote another show, all the pieces matter.
That's not to say it's completely golden perfection. Cassian spends a chunk of the first two episodes bogged down with some would-be rebels who seem to have learned everything from Keystone Cops, in a storyline that drags a little. The time jumps between each set of episodes can leave a bunch of storylines feeling unresolved. Mon Mothma's domestic life with her husband and daughter early on is left dangling in the breeze (with a coda showing her husband re-married feeling like an apologetic sop to viewers invested in that story). A major speech Mon Mothma makes is hyped but we never hear it, because it was already made on animated series Rebels and they didn't want to repeat themselves.
But such quibbles are overshadowed by everything it does right. Luthen's increasingly ruthless scheming (Stellan Skarsgard should walk away with every award going), Dedra and Syril's bizarrely watchable relationship and Major Partagaz's troubles managing the semi-incompetent ISB (Anton Lesser an under-sung hero of the show, as he was in Game of Thrones, The Crown and Wolf Hall). Partagaz lecturing underlings to "calibrate their enthusiasm," is one of the most amusing scenes in Star Wars history, and Director Krennic's weird interrogation tactics are very entertaining. The show also fulfils its potential as an epic tragedy, with heroes dying unmourned in the dark, and the clock ticking with palpable doom towards Rogue One where we know many of these characters will meet their fate. When several of them do survive (at least the end of this series), there's a feeling of relief. The show also delivers good action, not as much as you'd expect from Star Wars, but it instead builds tension and dread like nothing else in the franchise before finally pushing the button.
Andor tells a story of authoritarianism becoming ever more arbitrary, incoherent and violent, and the yearning of people for freedom and expression rising to meet it. It is a heavy story, but one that is also run through with signs of hope. A better tomorrow is possible, if people are willing to work and fight for it.
Star Wars: Andor's second season (*****) is not quite as tight as the first season, but it's bigger, more epic and more emotionally powerful, steered by outstanding actors working with excellent scripts. It's one of the best slices of Star Wars produced since 1977 and restores some faith in a franchise that has faltered too much recently. The season is available to watch now on Disney+.
Thank you for reading The Wertzone. To help me provide better content, please consider contributing to my Patreon page and other funding methods.
Fourteen years after the end of the Clone Wars, the Galactic Empire seems to be invulnarable. From Coruscant, a colossal bureaucracy rules over millions of worlds through thousands of warships and a vast number of troops. Resistance appears futile. But there are those who believe otherwise, and from the lowliest depths of the poorest planets to the halls of the Galactic Senate itself, a rebellion is taking shape. Fighting this rebellion will not be easy, or pretty, or easy, and to start it requires a single victory, small in scope but enough to start the avalanche.
When Lucasfilm was putting together its initial package of live-action Star Wars TV shows, the one about Cassian Andor, a relatively low-key character from Rogue One, always seemed like the most random and least interesting. An Obi-Wan show? Sure, that makes sense. A show about Mandalorians? Cool. A Boba Fett series? Why not? But this guy? Diego Luna gave a great performance and there were some interesting edges around this more amoral, ruthless rebel operative, but he didn't exactly seem to be screaming out for more backstory.
Andor's first season proves that guess completely wrong, and unexpectedly emerges as the best of the live-action Star Wars shows to date, knocking the underwhelming Obi-Wan and disappointing Book of Boba Fett into a cocked hat, and even shading the fun Mandalorian. Coming across as the answer to the question, "What if Star Wars was on HBO?", Andor is a serious, adult SF drama about totalitarianism, the price of freedom, the perils of resistance and ultimately how the smallest acts can have huge ramifications.
The show nominally focuses on Cassian Andor, with Diego Luna returning to play a younger, cockier version of the character from Rogue One. Flashbacks reveal his backstory as a young child on a planet left ravaged by an unexplained disaster, whilst his present-day story sees him recruited by Luthen Rael (a fantastic Stellan Skarsgård) from his adopted homeworld of Ferrix to take part in a rebel raid on the planet Aldhani. The raid triggers a massive series of reprisals by the Empire, with the Imperial Security Bureau sending its best agents to track down those responsible. Andor absconds from the cause the first chance he gets, only to wind up, ironically, getting arrested and sentenced to an Imperial prison facility under a false identity. There he has to learn to become a leader and a facilitator for his fellow inmates, and sets about recruiting the reluctant floor manager Kino Loy (an outstanding Andy Serkis) to his cause.
However, one of the show's smartest moves is using Andor as the connective tissue between the ground-level story of how the Empire is crushing the common people, exemplified by Andor himself, and a much higher-level story in the Imperial Senate, where Mon Mothma (Genevieve O'Reilly reprising her role from Rogue One and Revenge of the Sith, the only high-profile actor apart from Luna and Forest Whitaker as Saw Gerrera to return from the films) is trying to simultaneously present herself as a harmless, bleeding-heart irritant against the Emperor's tyranny whilst secretly funding the establishment of the Rebel Alliance. When the financial web she's spun to carry this out is abruptly broken, she urgently needs to find a way of covering her back before the Empire discovers and destroys the Alliance before it can even get going.
In some senses Andor is an atypical Star Wars show: there's only a single, brief space battle and only a few ground-based action scenes. Much of the show seems to revolve around taut conversations between desperate individuals. The Empire is frequently presented as a mildly boring bureaucracy packed with functionaries just trying to get through the day so they can go home, rather than psychopathic maniacs. One major storyline revolves around financial dealings and shadow accounts and distasteful criminal deals like an episode of The Wire. It's also a decidedly more adult show: sex is alluded to more than in most Star Wars material, we get our first blink-and-you'll-miss-it bit of swearing in the franchise and character motivations are much more the focus, rather than cool spaceships or droids (though we do get at least one great new spaceship and a somewhat sympathetic robot with B2EMO).
It's a bold step but also a necessary one. Star Wars is now a transmedia franchise that is clearly never going to entirely stop this side of the end of human civilisation, but it can't do that if it doesn't broaden its tonal horizons and become a much broader church than what it has been up until now. Lucasfilm has been reluctant to do that - after hiring Phil Lord and Christopher Miller to make a more comedic Star Wars movie with Solo, they panicked when the directors did exactly that and fired them - but seems to have now gotten the message. How far this will go remains unclear: will we eventually get Star Wars the romantic comedy (no, Attack of the Clones does not count) and Star Wars the horror franchise? Maybe. But starting that broadening with Star Wars: The Prestige Streaming Showcase isn't such a bad idea.
Andor works because it shows us in a very real way how day-to-day life in the Empire works. It doesn't actually appear to be that bad, as long as you keep your head down and work hard and don't speak out, and you might even get a promotion and fancy you can work inside the system to your family's benefit, or try to make things better. But the insidiousness of the Empire is clear, as it beats and crushes the spirit out of people slowly, day by day. Star Wars has always nodded a little at Nineteen Eighty-Four with its depiction of the Empire, but that influence is much stronger here, with a bit of Brazil-esque surrealism thrown in as well (particularly with Syril Karn's story). The effort it takes for people to "wake up" and realise they have to fight is startling, but once that ball starts rolling it becomes difficult to stop.
Andor does have some flaws. The pacing is deliberate and measured, and for the most part that works well. However, there's at least one episode's worth of material that could have been shaved off to make an even tighter, sharper show. There's also some creaky continuity gaps between Andor and the rest of the franchise: The Bad Batch established that resistance movements against the Empire began almost immediately after its founding (with Andor character Saw Gerrera playing a leading role!), and Rebels, set almost simultaneously with this show, seems to suggest the Rebel Alliance should be much further along the road to being the spaceborne insurgency we all know. Having the Rebellion in a much more nascent form here doesn't seem to be quite right. Others will bemoan a Star Wars show without more action, or one they can't perhaps as easily sit down to watch with their kids.
That said, it's hard to argue with quality. Andor's first season (****½) is an impressive, adult science fiction drama that interrogates many of the ideas and premises of the Star Wars franchise that we haven't seen in live-action before (some of the novels and video games have trodden this kind of ground, though), and restores hope to a franchise that was in danger of becoming moribund.
The season is available to watch now worldwide on Disney+. A second season is in production for airing in 2024.
Thank you for reading The Wertzone. To help me provide better content, please consider contributing to my Patreon page and other funding methods.
Writer and showrunner Tony Gilroy has dished the dirt on his upcoming Star Wars TV show Andor. A prequel to the movie Rogue One, the TV series focuses on Rebel Alliance agent Cassian Andor (Diego Luna), a ruthless operative who won't let anything stop him from helping bring down the Empire.
The show has the distinction of being the longest live-action Star Wars season to date, with twelve episodes in its first season. That compares to the six of Obi-Wan Kenobi, the seven of The Book of Boba Fett and the eight of each of The Mandalorian's seasons so far. The show is also already prepping a second season, which will apparently complete the story.
According to Gilroy - who previously wrote the first four Bourne movies and helmed the extensive rewrites and reshoots on Rogue One during its production period - the first season (which starts five years before Rogue One) is about how Andor becomes a revolutionary and joins the Rebel Alliance, whilst the second season tells the story of the events leading up to the start of Rogue One. As a result of that structure, don't expect K-2SO (Alan Tudyk) to show up until Season 2.
The show will have more of an ensemble feel, with a large cast of characters as well as Andor, and a major focus on the character of Mon Mothma (Genevieve O'Reilly), the head of the Rebel Alliance. Mothma previously showed up in Return of the Jedi (when she was played by Caroline Blakiston) as utterer of the infamous line, "Many Bothans died to bring us this information." O'Reilly took over the role of the younger Mothma in a scene cut from Revenge of the Sith, but finally got to play the role onscreen in Rogue One. Apparently Mothma and Andor will not cross paths until Season 2, but their parallel journeys in Season 1 are a major part of the story.
I'm not entirely sure this is a story that needs to be told, but Diego Luna is a great actor and Gilroy is an excellent writer and director when it comes to spy stories, so it should, at the least, be intriguing. Rogue One also stands tall as the best Star Wars movie of the recent era (if not the best since Empire), so seeing an extension to it's story could be worthwhile.
Star Wars: Andor is expected to debut on Disney+ before the end of the summer.
Disney are going into the new decade with a very big and unexpected headache regarding Star Wars. In 2012 Disney purchased Lucasfilm and all its properties (including Star Wars and Indiana Jones) and subsidiaries (including Industrial Light & Magic) from George Lucas for a cool $4 billion. They have since made some solid bank, going into profit on the deal. However, the recent performance of the Star Wars franchise has caused some frantic rethinking of how to handle the property moving forwards.
The first films released under the new regime were extremely successful: The Force Awakens (2015) grossed over $2 billion worldwide, whilst Rogue One (2016), a side-project which Disney were expecting not to top $1 billion, instead made a respectable $1.05 billion at the global box office.
The first signs of problems came with the release of The Last Jedi (2017). The film had a rapturous critical pre-release period, but the post-release response was much more mixed. The film topped out at $1.3 billion, still securing a healthy profit but the $700 million drop from The Force Awakens was a nasty surprise for Disney who'd been projecting a more modest drop and a final gross of $1.5-1.7 billion, more in line with the drop between their first two Avengers films.
Worse was to come with the second Star Wars spin-off movie, Solo (2018). A change of director and extensive reshoots on the film pushed its budget well above $300 million. Lucasfilm, who at one point were hoping to release two to three Star Wars films a year to match Marvel's performance, also refused to listen to theatre chain requests to hold the film back until a December release and insisted on a May release. The result was a box office bomb: Solo grossed $394 million worldwide when it needed well north of $800 million to just break even. The film will eventually make a profit from streaming and media sales, but it's going to take years.
Disney's response was swift. Several additional Star Wars spin-off movies were outright cancelled (such as one about Boba Fett) or moved to television (the long-gestating Obi-Wan Kenobi standalone). It was also decided to bench the franchise for three years, with the next Star Wars movie not expected until December 2022. Disney also tapped Game of Thrones showruiners David Benioff and Dan Weiss to write and direct that movie - expected to be the first in a series in a new (at least to cinema) part of the Star Wars universe (possibly related to Laeta Kalogridis' Knights of the Old Republic script) - following their success at HBO. Last Jedi director Rian Johnson was also attached to write and potentially direct a new trilogy, but after The Last Jedi's performance Johnson's new project appears to have been sidelined whilst Lucasfilm reconsidered (Johnson was also due to direct his own stand-alone movie, the successful and well-received Knives Out).
A (potentially ill-advised) $200 million payday from Netflix led Benioff and Weis (still smarting from the poor reception to the ending of Game of Thrones) to quit Star Wars in October, abruptly leaving Disney without a film for release in three years' time. This has left Disney's future plans in tatters and they are now reconsidering their options.
At the same time, The Rise of Skywalker has launched to a further disappointing set of financial results. Eight days into release, The Rise of Skywalker is batting far below The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi. It is doing much better than Solo (thankfully) and tracking ever so slightly higher than Rogue One. Assuming the same kind of long tail holds up, The Rise of Skywalker should take home around $1-1.1 billion at the end of its run, a comfortable profit (the break-even point for the film is estimated at $825 million). A sharp drop-off in performance could reduce that significantly, and at much below $900 million Disney will be left with some very big, awkward questions to consider going forwards.
At the moment, the only Star Wars movie officially still in development is the first in Rian Johnson's trilogy, which appears to have originally been scheduled for 2023. Whether this will remain the case or be moved up to the 2022 slot is unclear. This would be tight if Johnson indeed (as he is apparently considering) does another smaller-scale film before returning to the Galaxy Far Far Away. Disney will have to start pulling triggers soon if it does want to get a Star Wars movie on screen for 2022, and will now be asking how much money they want to invest in it.
All of that said, Star Wars does seem to be doing well in the first stage of a hard pivot towards television. The Mandalorian, the first live-action Star Wars show, has been a critical and commercial success on Disney+ and helped drive the new streaming service's boisterous launch in the United States (it arrives in Europe, including the UK, in the spring). A second season of The Mandalorian is already in production and two further Star Wars TV shows are in development, one focusing on the morally dubious Rebel intelligence agent Cassian Andor from Rogue One and the re-tooled Obi-Wan project, with Ewan McGregor already on board.
With Star Wars no longer annihilating the box office as it used to, the future for George Lucas's franchise may be on the small screen rather than the large.
Disney have confirmed that their new streaming service will be called Disney+ and will launch next year with both Star Wars and Marvel mini-series.
Leading the charge will be a Marvel spin-off show focusing on the character of Loki, with Tom Hiddleston set to reprise his role from the Thor and Avengers films. It is believed that the show will be set some time before the events of Infinity War (and Thor: Ragnarok, which directly leads into Infinity War).
Also up in rotation is a Star Wars series focusing on the character of Cassian Andor from Rogue One, again with film actor Diego Luna reprising his role from the movie. The series will be (obviously) set before Rogue One and explore Andor’s background and presumably his early days carrying out missions for the nascent Rebel Alliance. Fans are hoping that Andor’s droid sidekick, K-2SO (voiced by Alan Tudyk) will also put in an appearance.
Disney have also already begun filming an ongoing live-action Star Wars TV series, The Mandalorian, for the network, helmed by Jon Favreau. Star Wars animation guru Dave Filoni is also resurrecting The Clone Wars for a 12-episode seventh season, some five years after the truncated sixth season aired.
On the Marvel side of things, Disney are also considering plans for a short-run mini-series focusing on Scarlet Witch, and a team-up series pairing Falcon with Winter Soldier. Elizabeth Olsen, Anthony Mackie and Sebastian Stan are all expected to reprise their roles from the movies if these limited series go ahead.
Disney+ will also include most of the corporation's back catalogue of films and TV shows, including material from the Pixar, Marvel and Lucasfilm brands. Some material is currently under licence to other streaming services such as Netflix and Amazon, and will have to wait until those licences expire. The first two Star Wars movie trilogies, for example, are under licence to Time Warner and will not be able to join Disney+ until 2024. Once Disney's acquisition of Fox is complete, it is expected that Fox's utterly enormous back catalogue of TV shows and movies will also start transitioning onto the service and (for R-rated material) the Hulu streaming network (which Disney acquired a controlling interest in from Fox).
Disney is planning to launch the service in late 2019, approximately a year from now.
The Galactic Empire is constructing a weapon of mass destruction with the help of a weapons expert named Galen Erso. The nascent Rebel Alliance has heard rumours of its existence but little more...until a defecting Imperial pilot goes to ground on Jedha with an extremist named Saw Gerrera. The Rebels dispatch intelligence agent Cassian Andor to Jedha along with Jyn Erso, Galen's daughter, with orders to discover the nature of the Imperial threat and uncover its weaknesses.
When is a Star Wars movie not a Star Wars movie? That's a difficult question to answer. For hardcore fans, the franchise has always been about the depiction of a vast galaxy with lots of stories to tell about characters and worlds unrelated to the Force, the Empire or the Skywalker family, across comics and video games and animated TV series, but for casual movie-goers it's a more complex question. Rogue One is the first live-action Star Wars film not to be about the Jedi or the machinations of the Skywalker family tree, but it still has X-wings, TIE fighters, droids and villains with perfectly-clipped English accents. Disney seem to be kidding themselves that they are taking a risk with this movie, although it's still a fine slice of action blockbuster entertainment that will have adult fans and kids queueing up to see the movie in droves (although no-one is expecting it to repeat the business of last year's The Force Awakens, it should still be one of the biggest films of the year).
Those same kids may be leaving the cinema in floods of tears though. I've seen some people saying that Rogue One is the "darkest Star Wars film except for Sith and maybe Empire". That's lowballing it. Rogue One is easily the most ruthless and bleakest Star Wars movie to date, dispatching characters with such murderous and sometimes offhand efficiency that even George R.R. Martin might rise an eyebrow at it. An insurgent bombing of an Imperial convoy in a desert town feels rather uncomfortable to watch given contemporary events in Syria and the concluding tropical battle, which starts off feeling like a cheerful CGI shoot 'em up before (in one of director Gareth Edwards' more subtle and brilliant moments) shifting gradually into Apocalypse Now, becomes increasingly uncomfortable to watch. For a franchise whose numbered entries have sanitised their violence (the dismemberment of Anakin in Sith being the only real previous moment of visceral horror in the series), Rogue One has no problem with pushing the boundaries of what kids will tolerate. If possible, I would advise a parent preview of the film before deciding if you want young kids (say under 10) from seeing it.
The movie tells the story of a group of original characters who, it is established, are the ones who hear about the Death Star and eventually steal the plans that allow Luke, Han, Chewie, Wedge, Biggs and company to blow up the station at the end of the original 1977 film, A New Hope. It's a film that therefore exists in a somewhat schizophrenic state: on the one hand, as an original piece with new characters it has the chance to do things that are brave, original or even experimental, but it has to also closely coexist with the established continuity, particularly A New Hope, which may be the most scrutinised and iconic SF movie of all time.
Against the odds, the film does - more or less - succeed at doing what it sets out to do. Our core team of saboteurs and mercenaries consist of Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones), Cassian Andor (Diego Luna), Chirrut Imwe (Donnie Yen), Baze Malbus (Jiang Wen), K-2SO (Alan Tudyk) and Bodhi Rook (Riz Ahmed). They are uniformly excellent, as you'd expect from seasoned hands (the newest performer here is Jones, who still made her screen debut twenty years ago as a child actress), and they all get their moments in the sun. The interplay and connection between the characters is pretty compelling and it's a shame that we're not going to see more adventures with them: Disney has ruled out a direct sequel to Rogue One and it sounds like the next few Star Wars movie are going to take place in the post-Force Awakens era or be more prequels set before Rogue One and focusing on the backstories of Han Solo, Lando Calrissian and (possibly) Boba Fett and Obi-Wan Kenobi.
The story slots into place rather neatly before the events of A New Hope (days, if not hours, separate the two) and helps clear up a few niggling continuity issues from that film, namely what happened to the Rebel fleet in that film, how did Princess Leia get the battle plans and just how stupid were the Death Star designers? It turns out they weren't, the designer was a Rebel sympathiser who deliberately built a weakness into his plans which, thanks to security-mandated compartmentalisation, no-one else was senior enough to spot. No wonder George Lucas is reportedly a fan of the movie, as it helps retcon a few of the (admittedly minor) issues from the original movie out of existence.
More problematic is that the film needs to deal with the fact that some major characters are shared between it and A New Hope, and many of those actors are now dead or forty years older than they were when they made that film. A mixture of solutions are deployed. Darth Vader, for example, is simply a new actor (Game of Thrones's Spencer Wilding) wearing the suit with James Earl Jones back to do the voice work. Mon Mothma and General Dodonna are lookalikes, with actors Genevieve O'Reilly and Ian McElhinney (also late of Game of Thrones) replacing Caroline Blakiston and Alex McCrindle. In a clever move, director Gareth Edwards used alternate takes of the X-wing and Y-wing pilots from the Battle of Yavin from A New Hope to directly drop some of the established pilots from that battle into this engagement (which makes perfect sense). More controversial is the decision to use CGI to recreate Grand Moff Tarkin, played by the late Peter Cushing. His first appearance comes reflected in a starship window and if they'd stuck to that approach and kept his appearance to a cameo that would have been fine. Instead, having the very-clearly CG Tarkin wandering around and interacting with other characters drops us very firmly into the uncanny valley. Fortunately it's only really a couple of scenes that this impacts, but it's still weird and feels a bit inappropriate.
One of the film's biggest issues is the odd structure and pacing in the final act. The film doesn't climax so much as end abruptly on a rather bleak and horrible note, with the writers and director Edwards content to let A New Hope take over in providing catharsis or a resolution to the many storylines in motion. In this sense the film feels like it maybe gives too short a shrift to its compelling own cast of heroes and reduces them to, from the POV of the entire saga, also-rans. It's a movie that short-changes its own cast of characters in order to set up another one you've already seen, which is certainly a valid direction to take, just a rather odd one. This more notable with the villains, with Director Krennic (Ben Mendelsohn struggling manfully with variable material) being very a clearly a C-lister compared to Tarkin and Vader, despite having vastly more screen time. Whenever he wasn't on screen, I tended to forget he even existed.
Ultimately, Rogue One (****) is a successful movie, even if it's more of a modest diversion from the main focus of the series rather than an original piece of film-making. There's some excellent space battles (and it's undeniably thrilling to see the original X-wings, Y-wings, TIE Fighters, Corellian Corvettes and Star Destroyers mixing it up), some impressive stunts and some superb acting from a bunch of contemporary actors all at the top of their game. There's some musings on the morality of warfare and how far the desperate Rebels are willing to go to achieve their ends which add a little more depth to proceedings. The CG resurrection of long-dead actors I could do without and the film crashes rather unsubtly through the barrier between "subtle homage" and "fan-service" a few too many times, but overall this is an entertaining and worthwhile film that experiments moderately with the Star Wars formula whilst not straying far from the series tropes. But on final reflection I have to say I found The Force Awakens a more emotionally satisfying film with a proper beginning, middle and end, despite its derivative re-use of plot elements from other films in the saga, whilst Rogue One ultimately can't quite deliver on its initially more interesting story and more satisfying action beats.
Star Wars: Rogue One is on general release across most of the world now. The next Star Wars movie, Episode VIII (the direct sequel to The Force Awakens), will be released in December 2017.
Lucasfilm and Disney have released another full trailer for Star Wars: Rogue One, the new stand-alone prequel movie to the events of A New Hope.
The new trailer expands further on the central storyline: Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones) is recruited by the Rebel Alliance when they learn that the Empire has been working on a powerful new space station for twenty years. They discover that Erso's father, Galen (Mads Mikkelsen), is the designer of the station's energy weapon and may know of a weakness. Erso forms an elite infiltration and retrieval squad consisting of blind spiritual warrior Chirrut Imwe (Donnie Yen), expert pilot Bodhi Rook (Riz Ahmed), heavy weapons expert Baze Malbus (Jiang Wen), former Onderon rebel leader Saw Gerrera (Forest Whitaker), reprogrammed Imperial assassin droid K-2SO (Alan Tudyk) amd Rebel handler Cassian Andor (Diego Luna). Their mission is to sneak into the construction site of the space station and retrieve its plans. Needless to say, things soon go wrong and Imperial Director Orson Krennic (Ben Mendelsohn) is soon on their trail for his boss, an apparently mostly off-screen Darth Vader (James Earl Jones).
The trailer gives us some pretty cool new visuals, including our first proper look at Hannibal's Mads Mikkelsen as Galen Erso and our first (very brief) glimpse of Y-wings and AT-STs in the movie.
Galen Erso and his daughter Jyn, when she is a young girl. From their ages and the plot of the tie-in novel Catalyst: A Rogue One Story, this scene takes place about 20-23 years before the events of Rogue One, during the closing stages of the Clone Wars.
An Imperial-clas Star Destroyer hanging out over the planet Jedha.
Galen Erso at an Imperial facility, where he is presumably working on the Death Star's superlaser weapon.
Director Krennic looking villainous.
The Death Star orbiting the planet Scarif, where it is in the final stages of completion.
Bodhi Rook comes up with the "Rogue One" designation for the infiltration squad.
TIE fighters doing a flyby of the Death Star.
The Rebels learn about the Death Star and collectively freak out.
AT-STs are deployed to help detain the Rogue One squad.
Dudes hanging out, possibly on Jedha.
Chirrut Imwe schooling some stormtroopers with his marksmanship (he's blind but can apparently sense the location of living beings through a unique Force connection, although he's not a Jedi and does not use a lightsabre).
Rebel Alliance X-wings attack an Imperial space station above Scarif. I suspect this is during the extraction of the Rogue One team, after the Death Star has departed.
This X-wing pilot looks vexed.
X-wings continue the attack, taking out laser turrets on the station. The Rebel fleet has hyperspaced in behind them, with both Rebel Transports and Nebulon-B frigates visible. There might be a Mon Calamari Star Cruiser in the fleet and there's certainly Mon Calamari in the Rebel base, which will get timeline fans arguing about things (the assumption being that the Mon Calamari didn't join the Rebellion until after The Empire Strikes Back, given the lack of Star Cruisers in the fleet in that film).
Stormtroopers getting blown up. Must be Friday.
The planet Jedha has a very bad day.
Darth Vader turns up for a quiet word with Director Krennic.
Rebel U-wings attempt to extract the Rogue One team from Scarif. The big walkers aren't actually AT-ATs but cargo walkers adapted for defence. It's possible that this film gives the Empire the idea of converting them into dedicated war machines.
Cassian Andor, Jyn Erso and K-2SO sneak into an Imperial base, presumably on Scarif.
The all-important title card.
Star Wars: Rogue One (or Rogue One: A Star Wars Story) will be released worldwide on 16 December.
In four months Star Wars: Rogue One will hit cinema screens. It will be the biggest risk in the forty year history of the franchise. It'll be the first movie in the series which does not revolve around lightsabres, the Force or the Skywalker family. A Dirty Dozen in space, it will carefully explore whether mass audiences are willing to watch stories in that universe which are not related to the characters or premise of the original movies.
"That's a nice eclipse. But wait, this planet has no moon, how can we have an eclipse?"
"That's no moon..."
That said, it's not that much of a risk. The film will be partially set on the Death Star and characters like Mon Mothma and even Darth Vader will appear (if only, in the latter case, for what sounds like an effective cameo). And whilst cinema audiences may not be used to Star Wars without the Skywalkers, it's something many millions of more dedicated fans have experienced for decades in mediums like the comic books, novels, video games and animated TV series like The Clone Wars and Rebels. Even if, somehow, Rogue One does badly, it'll only be another year before Episode VIII (still, curiously, not titled by Lucasfilm) hits cinema screens to continue the adventures of Luke Skywalker, Kylo Ren, Finn, Rey and everyone else from The Force Awakens.
We know that Disney wants to release a Star Wars movie every year from now until the end of time (probably) and this will mean them telling completely original stories in the setting. It's actually a clever move, because after Rogue One the other planned spin-off movies are actually dove-tailing into the main saga by exploring the backstories of major characters, which gives them time to see if Rogue One is a success before committing to more original movies. So here's a look at what we know about the upcoming movies and throw some ideas about for films beyond that:
In Production
Star Wars: Rogue One Directed by Gareth Edwards Release Date: 16 December 2016 Status: Late post-production
You should have already seen the trailers for this. Rogue One is a prequel to the original Star Wars trilogy, taking place just weeks before the events of A New Hope. The film chronicles the completion of the Death Star, the Rebel Alliance getting wind of the Empire's new superweapon and a crack team of morally dubious commandos being dispatched to steal vital technical data on the weapon. It's this data that eventually gets into the hands of Princess Leia and R2-D2, kicking off the entire saga.
This film is unusual in that it focuses on non-Force-using characters, with Edwards describing it as a war film more in the vein of The Dirty Dozen than the fantasy adventure fun of the previous movies. The film will apparently have a slightly "grittier" tone than the main films and will probably not even have a scene-setting opening crawl. It will also be the first Star Wars movie to not be scored by John Williams. The film is likely to be a big success but whether it will match the heights of The Force Awakens remains to be seen: the marketing for this film has been extremely restrained so far, compared to where we were a year ago for Episode VII.
Star Wars: Episode VIII Directed by Rian Johnson Release Date: December 2017 Status: Early post-production
This film picks up after the end of The Force Awakens, with Rey trying to convince Luke Skywalker to train her in the ways of the Force, Finn recovering from the injuries he sustained in the battle with Kylo Ren and Ren, himself badly wounded, being taken to Supreme Leader Snoke to be healed and learn more of the Dark Side of the Force. The Resistance is reeling from the destruction of Hosnian Prime, but the First Order has also been dealt a serious blow with the destruction of Starkiller Base, likely leading to renewed fighting between the two sides.
The second of the new Star Wars episodes is directed by Rian Johnson, who is extremely well-respected for his original SF movies Brick and Looper, not to mention his excellent work on Breaking Bad. This movie will be huge - potentially bigger even than The Force Awakens - and hopefully a bit more original on the story side of things.
Star Wars: Han Solo Directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller Release Date: 15 May 2018 (likely, in my opinion, to change) Status: Pre-production and casting
This film will explore the backstory of everyone's favourite smuggler, Han Solo. The movie is apparently set ten years before the events of A New Hope and will explain how Solo acquires the Millennium Falcon, with a young Lando Calrissian also expected to appear. You'd also expect Chewbacca to show up, but that has not yet been confirmed.
Phil Lord and Christopher Miller have a huge amount of both geek cred and studio support, having taken The Lego Movie, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs and 21 Jump Street (plus its sequel) to box office success and critical acclaim. They recently announced that Alden Ehrenreich will be starring as the young Han Solo, and the Internet approved mightily of the (unconfirmed) rumour that Community actor Donald Glover will be playing Lando. Lawrence Kasdan, co-writer of The Empire Strikes Back, Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens, is also co-writing this movie with his son. This seems like a pretty strong project, with Han Solo's roguish adventures being the perfect setting for a Star Wars movie. Interestingly, this may also be a relatively small-scale Star Wars movie without the planet-destroying superweapons and galaxy-spanning wars of the other movies. Some rumours have suggested it may also take cues from Ocean's Eleven, which would be interesting although possibly self-defeating (why make a Han Solo, er, solo movie if you then immediately add lots of other main characters?).
Even the suggestion that Disney might spin this out into a trilogy of films ending shortly before the events of Episode IV isn't necessarily a bad thing, providing the writers, directors and, most impotantly, the actor all deliver on the tremendous promise.
Star Wars: Episode IX Directed by Colin Trevorrow Release Date: December 2019 Status: Pre-production and writing
Given that Episode VIII is still sixteen months away, it's probably premature to speculate too much about Episode IX. But this film will likely resolve the fates of Kylo Ren, Finn and Rey and the First Order and finally bring peace to the galaxy, at least until such time that Disney's finances require the inevitable Episode X-XII trilogy be made.
Colin Trevorrow was a bit of an eye-opening choice for this film, with only two previous movies on his resume and, unlike Rian Johnson, neither were critical successes. But when one of those movies was the franchise-rejeuvenating, money-making machine Jurassic World, that doesn't really matter. What is more hopeful is that Rian Johnson is hanging around to co-write the script.
In Development
These ideas have all been thrown around by Lucasfilm in interviews before, so we can assume that they have at least been discussed.
Star Wars: Boba Fett
A film revolving around everyone's favourite space mercenary Boba Fett has been mooted several times before. Fett was the break-out star of the original trilogy, a background character with a bare handful of words who was defeated by Han Solo by accident and eaten by a giant hole in the desert, but somehow retained his cool aura. The Clone Wars animated series actually did a reasonable job of filling in his character and backstory.
I'm a bit torn on this one. On the one hand, Boba Fett worked in the original trilogy because he was hardly in it. He showed up, showed some sass to Darth Vader and then apparently died. Both the Expanded Universe and the new canon have ruled that he survived his fall into the Sarlaac, but the Expanded Universe novels did arguably then over-use him, particularly in trying to make him a morally-justified Mandalorian warlord. Part of me thinks Fett should remain firmly off-screen.
But the approach suggested by Lawrence Kasdan is also interesting. Kasdan, who is known not to be a fan of the prequel trilogy, apparently penned a treatment in which the Boba Fett from Attack of the Clones is attacked and killed by a Clint Eastwood-esque "man with no name" who then steals Fett's identity before the events of the original trilogy. It's a nice idea, but I get the impression that Lucasfilm vetoed it, possibly feeling it was a bit of an insult to George Lucas (who clearly intended them to the be the same character, even redubbing all of Fett's lines in the original trilogy with the Attack of the Clones actor's voice). Kasdan later announced that Han Solo will be his last movie, so the Boba Fett project - which appears now to have been moved to the backburner - will have to find another writer.
Star Wars: Yoda
A Yoda-centric Star Wars story has actually been on the cards since George Lucas made Return of the Jedi. When the Expanded Universe took off a few years after that movie came out, Lucas forbade any of the novel authors, RPG designers or TV scriptwriters from giving any information at all on Yoda or his species. The closest anyone got was when Knights of the Old Republic II featured an alien of the same race. So clearly Lucas wanted to carefully protect Yoda's backstory for another time.
That said, a Yoda-centric movie might be a hard sell. The prequel trilogy didn't really endear audiences more to the character (who was rather more humourless and less relatable than his appearances in the original trilogy) and, like Fett, Yoda works more in small doses. Maybe a film that explores his 900-year backstory without necessarily featuring him in every scene might work. I suspect this film is also now on the backburner as Lucasfilm debate how to handle it.
Star Wars: Obi-Wan
This project doesn't appear to have been on Lucasfilm's radar, but came up as a possibility after Ewan McGregor enthusiastically endorsed the idea in interviews. McGregor had been lukewarm on his experiences filming the prequel trilogy (noting his numerous emotional scenes where he had only a tennis ball to react to), but apparently is keen to revisit the character with a better writer and more meaty material to handle. This film would presumably be set between the events of Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope and see Obi-Wan called away from Tatooine to undertake a new adventure. It is also possible that this film could dovetail into either (or both) the proposed Boba Fett and Yoda projects. There's also the fact that in A New Hope Luke notes he has met Obi-Wan before, so this movie could also explore that first meeting.
Mostly, I think a lot of people feel bad that an actor of McGregor's calibre was let down by poor material in the prequel trilogy and want to give him another shot with the character.
Possible Ideas
These are ideas that fans and writers have thrown around, with variable amounts of plausibility.
Star Wars: Rogue Two
Probably not revolving the character from The Empire Strikes Back (although at this rate, in another fifty movies' time that may actually be a viable idea). More plausibly, this could be another adventure with the Rogue One crew, or whoever survives that movie, perhaps going after the Death Star II plans (presumably helped by many Bothans) or getting involved in more between-movie shenanigans.
More likely would be a film that tries to do the same kind of thing as Rogue One: a completely new adventure with a whole new cast, just set in the wider Star Wars universe.
Star Wars: Mace Windu
Like Ewan McGregor, Samuel L. Jackson has expressed interest in reprising his prequel trilogy character of Mace Windu, famed for his purple lightsabre. Unlike the proposed Obi-Wan movie, this would be rather more difficult since Mace Windu dies in Revenge of the Sith when his arm is chopped off by Anakin Skywalker and he is then blasted out of the window of the Chancellor's office with Force lightning.
OR DOES HE?
No, he does, but Jackson has heroically argued that Windu could have survived his multi-mile plummet onto the streets of Coruscant and gone into hiding, emerging many years later to wreak havoc on the Empire, presumably before dying for real (to explain why he's not in the original trilogy). It's a nice idea, but given the already-ridiculous return of Boba Fett from the dead I think this is probably an idea best avoided.
Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic
BioWare's classic 2003 computer RPG is widely-cited as the finest piece of Star Wars material ever created outside the movies, with its 2004 sequel from Obsidian Entertainment (which explores a much more morally murky idea of the Star Wars universe) not far behind it. These two games have spawned enormous numbers of popular spin-offs, including the current online multiplayer game The Old Republic. A film version of the story, or exploring the same time period (4,000 years before the original trilogy) when the Jedi and Sith are both numerous and engaged in galaxy-spanning conflicts, could be quite interesting.
Star Wars: Thrawn
Grand Admiral Thrawn is the most popular Star Wars character not to appear in the films, instead having been the star villain of Timothy Zahn's early 1990s novels which launched the Expanded Universe. The EU is gone but Thrawn has been carried forwards into the new continuity, with him set to appear as a villain in Season 3 of the Rebels animated series and Zahn writing a new novel about him.
A movie featuring Thrawn as a villain would be very popular. Hugo Weaving was previously a fan favourite to play him, but Benedict Cumberbatch now seems to be the actor of choice to take on the role. Such a film would also, if set between Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens, explore a time period which is still a bit murky and may allow other EU characters like Mara Jade to appear in the new canon.
This assumes that Thrawn won't just be killed off in Rebels, but that would appear to be a waste of an excellent villain.
Star Wars: The Huttfather
Jabba the Hutt stars in a Godfather-riffing trilogy exploring his backstory, rising from a poor young Hutt in the swamps of Nal Hutta to an immigrant to the Vertical City of Nar Shaddaa to his rise to a powerful crimelord of the Outer Rim, based on Tatooine. Robert De Niro will play the young Hutt in lengthy flashbacks.
Okay, I made that up. But at this rate this will be a viable project in about ten years or so.
Lucasfilm has dropped a major trailer for Rogue One, the next Star Wars movie.
The movie features the first proper appearance of Alan Tudyk's droid character, who seems to be channelling a bit of HK-47 from the Knights of the Old Republic games.
Rogue One, which takes place shortly before the events of the original Star Wars (or Episode IV: A New Hope if you really insist), will be released on 14 December 2016.
Lucasfilm have released a new behind-the-scenes featurette for Star Wars: Rogue One, which features a lot of new footage from the movie.
They've also unveiled a new poster for the film:
A second trailer for the film aired at the London Star Wars Celebration. The trailer was exclusive for that event, but I wouldn't be surprised to see it released to the wider world in the next few weeks.
Star Wars: Rogue One will be released on 16 December this year.
Disney and Lucasfilm have confirmed that Star Wars: Rogue One is undergoing five weeks of reshoots over the course of this month and early July. The internet has responded with panic, fuelled by rumours that people are unhappy with the early assembly cut of the movie.
Entertainment Weekly has investigated and concluded that the reshoots were always planned and are in fact now part of the normal creative process. Reshoots on earlier movies occasionally took place, but it was Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy which built in the idea of allowing for several weeks of reshooting in the middle of post-production, allowing scenes to be tweaked with new footage to clarify or expand on plot points. In fact, at the moment Rogue One is ahead of schedule compared to where The Force Awakens was, with the completed cut of the film expected to be assembled in August (compared to October for The Force Awakens).
The film will be released on 14 December 2016 and will chronicle the Rebel Alliance's theft of the plans for the original Death Star, leading directly into the events of Episode IV: A New Hope. Episode VIII - the direct sequel to The Force Awakens - is currently wrapping up shooting and will be released in December 2017.
