Hopefully you already have Rogue One: A Star Wars Story tickets locked down for Thursday. If so, stop watching and reading this stuff! What is wrong with you? But if you’re somehow still on the fence or unfamiliar with this whole Star Wars thang, then check out this new clip, which not only gives a taste of K-2SO’s dry, robot humor, but also adds a new wrinkle to our understanding of Rogue One’s main character, Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones).
The clip begins with Jyn Erso an Imperial prisoner and ends with her a prisoner of the Rebel Alliance instead:
This Rogue One clip reveals Jyn Erso’s discomfort with both the totalitarian Empire and the scrappy Rebellion. She sees herself as beholden to neither, just as willing to slash a Rebel commando’s face open with a shovel as she is killing faceless stormtroopers. This clip offers some good insight into how her character starts in Rogue One, before getting into all those “Rebellions are built on hope!” sentiments girding the backbone of the Rogue One marketing effort.
There are a couple of other nice things exemplified in this new Rogue One footage. We get both stormtrooper banter and the grungiest Imperial uniforms we’ve seen since Finn got his friend’s blood all over his helmet in The Force Awakens. But even rarer in a Star Wars film is the presence of effective Rebel ground troops. Typically, our view of the Rebellion is narrowed to heroes like Luke Skywalker or cannon fodder extras getting blown apart by AT-ATs. But here we witness a squad of Rebel soldiers swiftly and efficiently capture an Imperial transport of some sort. The portrayal of successful Rebel soldiery in a Star Wars war movie is one of Rogue One’s central appeals, so it’s nice to catch a bit of that in action.
But really, let’s just stop watching these clips and see the movie already.
