“Star Wars” is not typically known for having much of a visual style — the movies usually look good, but also pretty vanilla. “The Force Awakens” had a little bit of visual panache, but it was also very grounded in that traditional “Star Wars” look. “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story,” though, is going all out in its own direction visually, and you can see that quite clearly in these shots from the new trailer that dropped Thursday night, including this one of Darth Vader.
Literally just a shot of the Death Star as seen from “below.” This could simply be a statement of the film’s intent to visually try a bunch of new things for the franchise. Though I’m sure the film itself will give it some real meaning.
This shot of Rebel troops huddling together in a transport ship is very much straight from a war movie — and despite having that word in its title no “Star Wars” movie thus far would have fit that bill. But it does seem to be what director Gareth Edwards is going for with “Rogue One.”
Nobody does regular sized things next to large things like Edwards. TIE Fighters have never been as terrifying as this one facing off with Jyn Erso.
Continuing with the war theme, here’s a shot that would fit right in a World War II movie.
We’ve never seen a Star Destroyer hovering in a planet’s atmosphere in a film before, and this sort of ground-up look at any part of the intimidating Imperial war machine is unusual. But for “Rogue One” this sort of thing appears to be the norm.
At the battle on Hoth in “The Empire Strikes Back” we saw troops on the ground taking potshots at the Imperial AT-AT walkers with blaster rifles, but the real fighting happened with Rogue Squadron’s snowspeeder. Seeing one of our heroes firing a rocket launcher at one, with an over-the-shoulder perspective, then, is a super fresh new look.
And when that rocket smashes into a walker’s face and its head is knocked to the side because of it, that freshness is amped up to 11.
This is a shot of the newly constructed Death Star eclipsing the sun. This sort of blatant visual metaphor is definitely not something we’ve seen much of in “Star Wars.”
We’ve seen this room, or one very much like it, before — when Grand Moff Tarkin and Darth Vader made Princess Leia watch as they used the Death Star to destroy her home planet of Alderaan. It was ominously lit back then, but this is a whole other level of shadowy and terrifying.
There’s that Edwards scale at work again, with the tiny Rebel ship caught in a massive storm.
“The Force Awakens” introduced to “Star Wars” the idea of a shot that follows a starfighter through cool maneuvers, but there’s a moody atmosphere here that those shots lacked. Given that we see one of the X-Wings opening its wings this is likely a stealth approach before an attack — a scenario we’ve seen described in a number of “Star Wars” novels but not depicted on screen.
