{"id":653523,"date":"2026-06-23T06:46:11","date_gmt":"2026-06-23T06:46:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/653523\/"},"modified":"2026-06-23T06:46:11","modified_gmt":"2026-06-23T06:46:11","slug":"duncan-jones-rogue-trooper-is-a-sci-fi-extravaganza","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/653523\/","title":{"rendered":"Duncan Jones’ Rogue Trooper Is a Sci-Fi Extravaganza"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cRogue Trooper,\u201d first published in the British comic anthology \u201c2000 A.D.\u201d in 1981, is perhaps the second most popular character to emerge from the publication after \u201cJudge Dredd.\u201d The property has inspired several spin-offs, board games and novelizations, along with multiple video game adaptations of varying quality. But a feature film adaptation has remained just out of reach \u2014 until now.<\/p>\n

An R-rated animated film version of \u201cRogue Trooper,\u201d from writer-director Duncan Jones, just premiered at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival. And it really is a marvel \u2014 both for the way it maintains the off-the-wall energy of the original comics and for being an independent film made on a much tighter budget than we\u2019d probably imagine (and may never know). Of course, neither of those things would matter if the movie weren\u2019t any good. But it\u2019s an absolute hoot: an otherworldly war movie populated by anthropomorphic weapons, arcane mythology and the kind of go-for-broke 1980s fantasy movie spirit that is (sadly) in short supply these days.<\/p>\n

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\u201cRogue Trooper\u201d begins with a \u201cStar Wars\u201d-ish crawl setting up the world and its stakes. Apparently, in the distant future, in some far-flung corner of the cosmos, two factions are battling over a planet \u2014 the Norts, who are framed as the bad guys because their subtitles are rendered in a Germanic font that practically screams \u201cwe are fascists\u201d; and the Southers, who are more democratic but perhaps morally looser, since they are the ones who created the \u201cgenetic infantryman,\u201d a blue-skinned, super-strong soldier whose lungs can withstand the toxic conditions of Nu Earth and whose memories are stored on a chip that can then be implanted into another cloned version after the current one gets shot, detonated or diced into little bits. (When this part of the crawl appeared, there was some tittering in the audience, considering Jones\u2019 previous movie, \u201cMoon,\u201d concerned similar cloning operations.)<\/p>\n

As the movie begins, a squadron of troopers is sent to the planet\u2019s surface \u2014 this is a seemingly never-ending war, full of cruelty and despair. Soon enough, the lead trooper, 19 (Aneurin Barnard), realizes someone has betrayed them. Each of his squadmates is killed, and he keeps them alive by transferring their memory chips into different objects \u2014 a helmet, a gun and a backpack. Yes, one of the characters in this movie is an anthropomorphic backpack. Another is, essentially, a talking hat. It\u2019s delightful.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s odd is that the characters take on more personality after they\u2019ve been untethered from their corporeal forms. This might be because a bunch of blue soldiers tend to look exactly alike, which could be a commentary on the way conflict turns individuals into featureless cogs. But it\u2019s also just a pitfall of computer-animated movies populated by a ton of similar-looking characters. This isn\u2019t a phenomenon unique to \u201cRogue Trooper.\u201d Admit it: it took you until halfway through the second \u201cAvatar\u201d to tell any of the kids apart. It\u2019s okay. You\u2019re in a safe space.<\/p>\n

Once 19\u2019s buddies are uploaded into their various objects, they set off on a journey to figure out who betrayed them and get them into new bodies, encountering unscrupulous scavengers (played by Jemaine Clement and Matt Berry), a fellow rebel trooper (Hayley Atwell) and a bloodthirsty assassin who looks like a rejected member of Daft Punk \u2014 and has the French accent to match (Peter Serafinowicz). And that\u2019s just scratching the surface.<\/p>\n

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\u201cRogue Trooper\u201d is gloriously overstuffed, packed with characters and bits of lore, technology and philosophizing (what does make you human, anyway? Especially after war has all but eroded your personality?). And that\u2019s part of its charm.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s something about the movie that will undoubtedly be enriched by an encyclopedic knowledge of the source material, but that knowledge isn\u2019t necessary to have a good time. There\u2019s an appealing throwaway quality to much of the terminology and many of the ideas presented in quick succession across the movie\u2019s just-over-two-hour runtime.<\/p>\n

Sure, you can pick all that stuff up and roll it around, but you don\u2019t have to. There\u2019s always some new, whirling thing just around the corner to distract and enchant you. And something bigger to blow up.<\/p>\n

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What makes the movie more impressive is that it was entirely made independently. This is not the work of a giant studio or even a smallish studio; this was a pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps type deal. And that is incredible.<\/p>\n

Jones, of course, has experience with large-scale visual effects, having worked closely with Industrial Light & Magic and other effects houses on Universal\u2019s mammoth \u201cWarcraft\u201d adaptation. But that movie came out a decade ago, which gives you a sense of how much the technology has evolved and productions have become nimbler. <\/p>\n

Jones used the same core technology and philosophy behind \u201cWarcraft,\u201d employing performance-capture techniques to create lifelike creatures. With \u201cRogue Trooper,\u201d though, he expanded that approach to create every character \u2014 human, alien, robot, whatever \u2014 using Unreal Engine, a game-development platform capable of rendering imagery in real time. (The Volume, the controversial \u201cdigital backlot\u201d technology that Disney helped pioneer, is also powered by Unreal Engine.)<\/p>\n

Does this mean \u201cRogue Trooper\u201d occasionally takes on the uncanny look of an expensive video game cutscene? Sure. But that\u2019s a feature, not a bug. Everything about \u201cRogue Trooper\u201d is heightened and exaggerated. This is a movie in which Jones, serving as both writer and director, wrings real emotion out of a talking (sometimes telepathic) helmet. As the film progresses, you can feel him growing more confident in both his storytelling and the tools used to deliver it.<\/p>\n

The third act is filled with visuals that feel lifted directly from the comic book, or at least share its strong sense of composition, dramatic lighting and bombastic design that has kept the character enduring for so long. \u201cRogue Trooper\u201d even gets its own 1980s-style theme song that, if you squint, you could imagine Queen belting out on the \u201cHighlander\u201d soundtrack. The fact that it\u2019s a brand-new track only makes it better.<\/p>\n

This is a movie full of giant robots and blue soldiers and gargantuan crystals sticking out of the ground for no other reason than that they look cool. You could imagine some of the tableaus from the film airbrushed on the side of a van or on the cover of a heavy metal album from the late 1970s. This is not going to be to everyone\u2019s taste. But the movie\u2019s freewheeling energy (again: you can retain as much as you want and discard as much as you want), its charming characters and genuinely awe-inspiring visuals, made on a fraction of a typical Hollywood budget but just as ornate as anything in a blockbuster costing hundreds of millions more, make \u201cRogue Trooper\u201d a unique and admirable object. Maybe it\u2019s something you\u2019d even go to war for.<\/p>\n

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