‘Andor’: Diego Luna’s ‘Star Wars’ Series Trailer Is Everything We Wanted from ‘Rogue One’

I’m an easy mark when it comes to Star Wars. I’m hyped for every show and I stockpile benefits-of-doubt just in case I need to deploy them once the show’s run begins (although occasionally I do run out). That’s the grain of Crait salt you have to take with my assessment of the new trailer for Disney+’s Rogue One prequel series Andor. My assessment? Dank farrik, this is going to be the best Star Wars show ever.

Highly presumptive praise, but at least I know I’m not alone in feeling this. And the new trailer — which reveals that the show’s release date has been pushed back to September 21 and been bumped up to a 3-episode premiere — only confirms all those hopes. Everything that this trailer is selling, I am buying — scooping up like it’s spring 1999 and these are the first wave of Phantom Menace action figures to hit Walmart shelves (which, yes, is something I did).

Don’t believe the hype? Just watch this trailer! Watch it again, if you have to! There’s all the usual Star Wars stuff to get excited about, like the return of the always charming Diego Luna, the way Andor settles into the mostly unexplored early days of the Rebellion, the droids and aliens and ships. But there’s the new stuff, too, the stuff that will be unique to Andor. There’s a sense of urgency to this trailer, a real feeling of tension.

It shows the proto-Rebellion fighting a war on multiple fronts, with Andor infiltrating Imperial outposts with ease (come on, who wouldn’t trust a guy who looks like Diego Luna?) and Mon Mothma (Genevieve O’Reilly) fighting against the Empire from within the senate. There’s also the exciting return of Forest Whitaker as Saw Gerrera from Rogue One. And then there’s Stellan Skarsgård, pulling off both the looks of a grizzled veteran of war and foppish Downton Abbey in space realness.

Okay, that last one is just for me and my general fondness for older men in uniform and/or formal attire. Moving on.

The thing that strikes me most, though, is how it feels like Andor aims to do what Rogue One: A Star Wars Story aimed to do when it landed in theaters in 2016 — what it aimed and, depending on how high your expectations were, kinda failed at. The problem with Rogue One lay more within the marketing and editing, as well as all of the speed bumps the production hit on its way to theaters. The trailers sold us a story of Rebel spies stealing the plans for the Death Star and included some damn iconic shots that showed off a more sobering and brutal side of Star Wars: a ground view of our heroes running through the mud, laser bolts from a towering AT-AT raining down on them; and another shot of Jyn Erso confidently striding across an open-air catwalk only to be confronted by a damn TIE fighter. Those moments, where the usually muted stakes of a spy story ran afoul of Star Wars‘ larger-than-life action, are what sold me on Rogue One. And then they were cut from the movie.

I know Andor‘s not going to have that problem by virtue of it having 12 episodes to tell the story of Cassian Andor’s first year as a spy for this resistance movement. There’s gonna be plenty of time for the show to give us moments the likes of which we’ve never seen in Star Wars, and plenty of time for it to make the most of its inherent Bourne-esque thriller style. Right now it looks like Andor is going to make good on the promises those Rogue One trailers made. And if that ain’t enough to get you hyped, I don’t know what will!

Star Wars: Andor premieres September 21 on Disney+, with three new episodes.