Now that Star Wars: The Force Awakens has been dissected, examined, and mulled over in just about every conceivable manner, we can begin to move our attention to something else. But fortunately we live in a world where Star Wars movies are coming down the pipe like, well, comic book movies, and don’t even have to leave that far, far away galaxy. Details and information regarding the next installment, the standalone Story film Rogue One, are surfacing and that picture is starting to come into focus.
There are potential SPOILERS for Rogue One: A Star Wars Story below. You’ve been warned. That said, these are also rumors, so you should treat them as such and take them with a grain of salt.
The folks over at Making Star Wars have been all over this beat from the very early going, and through their sources they’ve learned a number of production codenames for various factions of the Star Wars: Rogue One cast, for both heroes and villains. And they’re all weirdly aquatic in nature, but may tells us some things about the characters.
Felicity Jones’ character, who we’ve previously heard may be named Lyra Erso, is codenamed Green Seal Leader, Jiang Wen is referred to as Seal Communicator Blue, Forest Whitaker’s possibly one-legged character is called Eel Commander, and Alan Tudyk, who plays a droid, is being called Seal Droid. As we understand it, these are all good, or at least good-ish guys, but on the villain side, the characters all have codenames relating to sharks, which seems like the appropriate choice.
More than anything what this gives us is a better idea of various teams that may be involved and the hierarchy we’ll see amongst the players. Seals appear to be the good guys, probably the ones who are tasked with stealing the plans for the first Death Star, which we know is the big plot point in Rogue One. But it also looks like, within this, there will be multiple teams, much like how the Rebel Armada is split into various squadrons—Red, Blue, Green, and the rest. Since we expect to spend most of our time here with Felicity Jones’ character, it stands to reason that her team will be the main focus of Rogue One and that she’s the one in charge.
The Eel faction is a bit different. MSW’s post speculates that this means Forest Whitaker’s character is connected to the bounty hunters we’ve heard fit into the story somehow, though they don’t go into specifics at to why. They also speculate that Jiang Wen may also play a bounty hunter, though one with Rebel sympathies. It’s possible that, to obtain the Death Star plans, the Rebels turn to these less than savory characters, which would make sense because they are likely more skilled in things like heists than your average Rebel soldier.
This doesn’t offer much focus, but with each new nugget of information the bigger picture of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story becomes clearer. We’ll find out for sure how all of the pieces fit together when it opens on December 16.
