Star Wars: Rogue One - Predicting The Entire Plot In 10 Steps
It's a little more complicated than the opening crawl.
So, Star Wars: Rogue One looks pretty damn good, right? Its pitch is Opening Crawl: The Movie, and based on the two (three if you were at Star Wars Celebration) amazing trailers will boast an original trilogy aesthetic and director Gareth Edwards' trademark mastery of scale.
And yet we don't actually know that much about the story. Oh sure, we obviously know how it's going to end, and that many of the characters have ticking time bombs over their heads, but aside from that the plot is really unknown.
Or is it? Breaking down the trailers and (over) analysing the scant words from the filmmakers about the project it's actually possible to construct a pretty convincing plot overview for what's going to go down and how exactly it'll tie into the wider Star Wars mythos. Here's an in-depth prediction for Rogue One (in ten bitesize steps).
All the predictions here are based on content officially released or acknowledged by Lucasfilm, so nothing's coming from pesky set photos or studio leaks (some of which are out there though, so do tread carefully when reading up on the film - The Force Awakens had its entire plot spelled out in May 2015). However, there's still a distinct possibility some of this may be right, so a potential spoiler warning is in effect.
10. Jyn's Childhood
A lot's been made about the possibility of Rogue One not having an opening crawl after Kathleen Kennedy revealed they were experimenting with ways to make the Star Wars Story enterprise distinct from the main movies. However, the real reason there's not a crawl could be down to something more academic; the narrative structure won't allow it.
The Star Wars Celebration exclusive trailer opened with a young girl running from some invading Imperials on the same scorched planet we've seen Galen Erso and Shadowtroopers holding Rebellion dolls. That girl is Jyn and what we're seeing is the Empire, quite possibly Krennic himself given the presence of his personal guard, kidnapping Galen in the early days of the Empire to work on the superweapon for their moon-sized space station.
It's definitely possible this scene will be in flashback later on, but it fits the Rogue One remit better to be the opening, showing Jyn losing her father and setting that up as her overarching motivation.