Rogue Trooper review: Duncan Jones’ best film in decades

Rogue Trooper | Dir. Duncan Jones | ★★★★☆

Duncan Jones exploded onto the film scene in 2009 with his debut Moon, an elegiac sci-fi thriller about a sad astronaut (Sam Rockwell) grappling with an existential crisis. Since then Jones’ rockets have failed to ignite in such spectacular fashion: Source Code starring Jake Gyllenhaal was a smart if somewhat forgettable blockbuster; video game adaptation Warcraft was a disaster; and the less said about 2018’s Mute, an overblown homage to Blade Runner, the better.

But Jones is not a man who is easily deterred and science fiction clearly runs through his very veins. His latest project is an adaptation of Rogue Trooper from the cult-classic British anthology comic 2000 AD (best known as the home of Judge Dredd), rendered in computer animation that is stylistically not a million miles away from Warcraft, albeit without the live action elements. 

If you’re wondering who let Jones loose with the mega-budget required for yet another feature-length animation (Warcraft cost a reported $160m), the answer is… nobody, really. Rogue Trooper was made on a decidedly indie-movie budget of between $10m and $20m, utilising video game creation tool Unreal Engine 5 for its production. 

The result is a lovingly crafted if strangely earnest love letter to pulp science fiction, old-school war movies and video games. 

Rogue Trooper: A video game come to life

The first thing you notice, in fact, is just how much Rogue Trooper looks like a video game. The animation style will be immediately familiar to anyone who’s picked up a controller in the last ten years or so; the whole project has the air of a cut-scene from Gears of War or Cyberpunk 2077 or any number of big budget titles. It doesn’t look bad, exactly, but it shares the same… glossiness, the light reflecting in a way your brain identifies on an instinctual level as ever-so-slightly wrong, as if everything in this world is slightly clammy.

Perhaps everything in this world is slightly clammy: Rogue Trooper is set on Nu-Earth, a toxic planet-wide warzone where the fighting never stops. The Southers are making a big push against their bitter rivals the Norts, using platoons of genetically enhanced super soldiers to gain what might be a winning advantage. As well as being Captain America-style killing machines, these soldiers are also able to transfer their consciousness onto microchips should they perish in battle, allowing them to die for their country not just once but countless times. The perfect soldiers.

And so we meet 19 and his squad of blue-skinned warriors, although for most of the film 19 is the only one who still has a body: as his comrades fall, he inserts their microchips into whatever comes to hand: namely a gun, a helmet and a backpack. 

The first half of the film is essentially one long action sequence, which only serves to underscore the similarities with a video game cut-scene. The soldiers take out a fortress-sized tank, abseiling away as the thing explodes. Or they have a firefight amid a field of hallucinogenic gas, performing stealth take-downs while silhouetted against a dramatic psychedelic backdrop. There are even frequent shots of characters aiming through the scopes of their rifles, which can make Rogue Trooper feel a bit like watching a stream of Destiny or Overwatch. 

A brilliant voice acting cast

Its real strength, however, lies not in its action but in its voice acting. Aneurin Barnard is wonderfully likeable as the lead, his dulcet Welsh tones always a joy to hear amid the clamour of war, as are his band of regionally-accented brothers. It also boasts an embarrassment of talent in the supporting cast, including Matt Berry (brilliant as always), Reece Shearsmith, Diane Morgan (slightly wasted), Jemaine Clement and Sean Bean. 

Berry and Clement are especially great as two oily scavengers profiting from the destruction, but the dialogue is excellently written and delivered throughout. By the second half, you’re really invested in these characters, even the one who’s just a talking helmet.

It quite possibly makes you care about them a little too much – the Rogue Trooper of 2000 AD is a biting satire of imperialism, bureaucracy and the military-industrial complex, yet much of that satire takes a back seat to a more traditional hero’s journey.

Still, this is the best movie Jones has made since Source Code, possibly since Moon: it’s briskly entertaining from start to finish and infused with such breathless adoration for science fiction that it’s hard not to be won over.