While we’ll have to wait a year for another Star Wars episode, Rogue One is here to tide us over until then, and Lucasfilm has been putting out tons of promotional material to remind us that the new movie is coming very, very soon. Today, the studio released a short featurette that shows just how excited director Gareth Edwards is about his new movie, plus some bits of new footage we haven’t seen before.

Directing a Star Wars movie has to be any semi-nerdy director’s dream, and you can tell Edwards is just having the time of his life. He was handed the Rogue One reins after successfully launching Legendary’s kaiju movie reboot franchise with 2014’s Godzilla, and it’s looking like he has the same throwback vibe with Rogue One: bringing something new and different to a familiar formula while also peppering in callbacks to the original. There’s a great moment in the featurette where a shot of Mon Mothma and the resistance from A New Hope is followed directly by a shot from Rogue One of Jyn standing in exactly the same spot. You can tell that the sets and filmmaking technology have advanced, but it’s just familiar enough to send a few chills down the spine.

Rogue One has an interesting task because of its placement so close to the beginning of A New Hope and the fact that we already know, essentially, what happens. In the featurette, Edwards explains that the plot of Rogue One is right there in A New Hope’s opening crawl, so the movie will be less about what happens and if Jyn and her friends succeed, and more about how they do it. As Felicity Jones says, “They achieve what they achieve because they achieve it together.”

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story hits theaters December 16.

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