The New Star Wars Trailer: A Comprehensive GIF Analysis

“A major weapons test is imminent, and we need to know what it is and how to destroy it.” That’s basically the whole mission of Rogue One in a nutshell, spoken by Mothma as the superlaser is lowered into place on the Death Star. Check out those puny Star Destroyers for scale.

Erso’s chief partner in this group of rebels is Diego Luna. His character doesn’t have a name yet, but he’s got some smolder that reads a bit like Oscar Isaac in The Force Awakens, and they’re joined at the hip for most of the trailer, so we're just going to go ahead and say something's going on there.

Ben Mendelsohn (Netflix's Bloodline) plays the major villain, likely an Imperial Security Bureau officer, though the white uniform and tenuous canon status of uniform colors in the Expanded Universe means this remains a small mystery. He doesn’t get a menacing display, just one more shot of cooly walking into some post-battle wreckage, but that uniform is crisp.

What better way to serendipitously honor Jim Jarmusch’s 1999 masterpiece Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai than to cast Forest Whitaker as a wizened adviser? He’s rumored to be playing a bounty hunter here, and his voiceover warnings play over the rest of the trailer.

At some point, the mission doesn’t go totally according to plan, and there’s a chase. But more importantly, look at the droid lumbering along behind Jones and Luna. That’s allegedly *Firefly'*s Alan Tudyk in a motion-capture performance.

Donnie Yen as a samurai in space who beats down some stormtroopers is basically taking Star Wars full circle back to Akira Kurosawa’s Hidden Fortress, which should make George Lucas smile. No lightsaber, no problem.

Bright red Imperial Guards typically signal only one thing: Emperor Palpatine. Perhaps he’s still somewhat recovering, which is why he's stuck in that foggy cylinder. There are also rumors that Darth Vader makes an appearance. However, since he doesn’t really need a hooded cloak, we’re hoping the shrouded figure in this scene is Mads Mikkelsen’s character, since he doesn’t show up anywhere else in the trailer.

A hero shot of Erso in what appears to be a TIE fighter pilot uniform ends the trailer. This looks like an action-packed science-fiction heist movie, which seems like a perfect bit of tangential genre fare to debut the Star Wars anthology films. Rogue One: A Star Wars Story hits theaters Dec. 16.