I was pretty much offline all day yesterday, so of course it turned out to be a huge day for Star Wars fans. First, we got the release date for Star Wars: Episode VIII along with the confirmation (after months of us just assuming it was a done deal) that Looper helmer Rian Johnson would indeed be writing and directing the picture. Then we got the title announcement for Star Wars: Rogue One, the spin-off movie coming next year from Godzilla director Gareth Edwards and writer Chris Weitz. We also got the fantastic news that Felicity Jones (The Theory of Everything) would indeed be the lead in that picture.

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Image via 20th Century Studios

But Disney shareholders who were present at yesterday's announcement got even a little bit more than that when CEO Bob Iger showed the a piece of concept art for Star Wars: Rogue One. This is the kind of detour that can make our cultural Star Wars obsession seem a little bit silly - don't worry I'm not judging you for clicking on this, I'm the one who wrote it up - because it's basically a room full of people who know even less about Star Wars than I do (I've only seen the movies, which makes me something of a rookie) trying to describe a painting that, frankly, seems to be going over their heads.

Slashfilm has the details on the art, which is described as looking like "concept art for a video game," which sort of makes sense because concept art pretty much always looks like that. Here are some more descriptions from the room:

The concept art was a gritty “dark/gray image”: “very dark and done in greens, so it evoked the idea that it was being done under the cloak of night.”

 

The art showed 4-5 armored, soldier-like persons on the ground, “with two to three ships in the background.

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Image via Lucasfilm/Disney

But the most telling sentence of this game of telephone, which again I actually find interesting, comes with the cognitive dissonance that accompanies these varying statements. I'm including Slashfilm's preamble to it since they contextualize it well.

Unfortunately neither of the sources we talked to knew enough about the Star Wars expanded universe to describe exactly who the characters may have been or what ships were pictured in the background.

 

There were tough-looking vehicles too.

 

The ships were fairly dark, and in the background.

 

They weren’t obviously X-Wing Fighters, which our sources would have recognized.

 

They “seemed a bit bigger than X-Wings”.

 

“More like a transport ship of sorts” but probably not as big as the Tantive IV (the transport ship we see Darth Vader board at the beginning of A New Hope).

 

The characters were all “generic” looking “wearing the same dark outfit.” “I didn’t see anything that would distinguish them as individuals.”

As is the rule in modern online news aggregation, we simultaneously know more about a project and nothing at all.

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Image via Lucasfilm/Disney.