Was 'Rogue One''s Darth Vader Worth the Wait?

The whole world finally got to see what Darth Vader is going to look like in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story on Thursday night. Well, they got to see what the back of his head will look like, anyway. A new trailer for the film was aired for the first time during NBC's Olympics telecast, and the trailer subsequently made its official debut online, too. Fans had been waiting for the trailer since it was screened last month exclusively for attendees of the Star Wars Celebration in London.

But was the highly anticipated glimpse of Darth Vader worth the wait? Probably not, considering that the infamous villain only appears in the trailer for two seconds, literally, and even that ultra-brief appearance is in a postscript that is not connected to any of the trailer's other scenes. It could easily have been a snippet lifted from The Empire Strikes Back.

Maybe that's the point, though. The rest of the trailer sets up the plot of the new film as a prologue to Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, and many of the visual are intended to inspire chills in devoted fans. X-wings, TIE fighters, the Death Star, Star Destroyers, stormtroopers, even Mon Mothma - the trailer is filled with iconic sights and sounds that invoke the most classic of the classic Star Wars stories.

The trailer does, though, present the film's new characters in more detail, including expanded appearances by Jyn Erso and Cassian Andor. There's also much more of a new droid, K-2SO, whose C-3PO-like chatter is voiced by Alan Tudyk.