Star Wars

Hi! I'm a 48-year-old man and I just went to see Rogue One: A Star Wars Story! At 10:30 a.m.! On a workday!

Eleven long days separate the general public from the wide release of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. I dreamt last night that in their efforts to continue to stoke the eternal flame of hype, Lucasfilm unknowingly released the entirety of the film piecemeal over dozens of spliced-together promos. Some ambitious fan isolated each snippet of footage and stitched it back together into the competed feature and released it on his own under the title Not Rogue One. Other Star Wars aficionados, out of respect for the effort, then started to edit fan videos devoted to the DIY film that pretty much resembled the original promos from Lucasfilm. If Borges was alive today and far worse at writing, this would be his latest novella.

“It was Han and Leia during the week, and Carrie and Harrison during the weekend,” she says.

How far would you go to see one of the most anticipated movies of the year a few days early? Would you drive to the theater on the other side of town? Drive to a neighboring city? Cross state boundaries? Or  —  gee, I don’t know — fly all the way from your hometown to the United Kingdom for a chance to see a movie like Rogue One: A Star Wars Story 24 hours before everyone else?

While Star Wars: The Force Awakens left us with plenty of unanswered questions, perhaps no question looms as big over the franchise as the lineage of Daisy Ridley’s Rey. Ever since the film was released, fan theories have run wild with the questions of why Rey was abandoned by her parents and how she may have come by her force sensitivity. Is she the daughter of Obi-Wan Kenobi? Is she the daughter of Luke Skywalker? What is the significance of that flashback sequence? Inquiring minds want to know.

When an actor expresses interest in returning to an iconic role, I always wonder whether the actor needs the movie more than the studio needs the actor. Ron Perlman, for example, has spent years talking up his interest in another Hellboy movie, despite it being fairly obvious that the studio had no real interest in getting that project off the ground. So when Ewan McGregor told reporters last year that he would come back for an Obi-Wan Kenobi standalone movie, I wondered: does this make sense for everyone involved? Or was McGregor just doing the Hollywood equivalent of jumping on a trending hashtag?

On the latest episode of the YouTube series, The Star Wars Show, host Peter Townley unveiled a never-before-seen member of the Rogue One: A Star Wars Story cast. He may look like R2-D2 with a paint job, but that’s just because ... he looks like R2-D2 with a paint job. But this is a different droid! It’s C2-B5.

Good things come to those who wait; that’s what my mother used to say, anyways. Odds are she was just being polite and not thinking about the first standalone Star Wars movie, but it’s a sentiment that certainly applies here. We spent time waiting for the first Rogue One: A Star Wars Story teaser trailer, and then the first and second theatrical trailers, and then we were waiting for Empire Magazine to launch its October issue that has several new images from the movie. It would seem that life as a Star Wars fan is made up of waiting.

In the first teaser trailer for ‘Rogue One: A Star Wars Story,’ Mon Mothma revealed the first details about the movie’s plot: the Rebels were going after the Death Star plans. But the trailer didn’t include Mothma’s full dialogue. Thanks to a new international trailer, we now know who tipped off the Rebel Alliance.

We only just (officially) met the new Han Solo, but we might be seeing him onscreen longer than expected.