‘Rogue Trooper’ review: Duncan Jones adapts 2000 AD comic strip into eccentric, entertaining animated actioner

Dir. Duncan Jones. UK. 2026. 121mins

Moon director Duncan Jones returns to themes of dystopian sci-fi and cloning with his first animated feature, a dark, wryly eccentric comic book movie adapted from the popular 2000 AD strip Rogue Trooper (the titular character, a blue-skinned ‘genetic infantryman’ named 19, is laconically voiced by Aneurin Barnard). Inadvertently dropped behind enemy lines in a conflict between the Norts and the Southers, 19 swiftly realises that he has been betrayed. With the memory chips of his slain genetically modified brothers-at-arms stashed in various bits of equipment, he must get to safety and warn his superiors before they mount an ill-fated attack.

Not everything works, but there is much to admire

The photorealist animation style will draw comparisons with James Cameron’s Avatar pictures, but while Jones’ picture – which premiered as a Special Event at Annecy – may look like a Hollywood action adventure, it is distinctively British both in its sensibility (no Avatar earnestness here, just a bracingly sarcastic and pitch black humour) and its indie budget. This latter shows at times, with some of the action looking a little rough around the edges. But the sheer weirdness of an ultra-violent near-future slaughter fest in which three of the key characters are a wise-cracking helmet (Daryl McCormack), a talking gun (Jack Lowden) and a malfunctioning sentient backpack (Reece Shearsmith) should go some way to making up for an occasional lack of technical polish.

The core market for this picture will likely be made up of audiences familiar with the source material – the scrappy British upstart alternative to America’s Marvel and the DC output, 2000 AD has a loyal fanbase. Astute marketing could capitalise on this and build the picture into a cult item and midnight movie fixture on the rep circuit.

The film opens with an emphatic message that no AI was used in its making, followed by a Star Wars-style crawl that fills in the background to the current conflict. An interminable war rages between the Norts (the baddies, we assume, as they have German accents)  and the Southers over the poisoned planet Nu-Earth. There’s not a whole lot that seems worth fighting for – toxic, sulfurous smogs swirl over the blighted surface of the contested territory. Most soldiers need breathing apparatus just to function.

But the Southers have developed enhanced super soldiers who can breathe the atmosphere and, thanks to their memory chips, are essentially immortal, just as long as there’s a cloned replacement body on hand. In the meantime, chips without bodies need to be implanted in a piece of kit to keep them viable. Hence the talking helmet, gun and backpack, all of which are able to chat with each other, in regional British accents, through chip-to-chip communication – but also, despite the lack of mouths and vocal cords, seem to be able to speak to other characters.

The aggressively synthetic hyper-real character design takes a bit of getting used to – we’re deep in uncanny valley territory here. Jones employed facial motion capture and Unreal Engine; the faces are unsettlingly familiar and yet also creepily wrong, with their damp putty skin textures and grotesquely exaggerated features. But then war is ugly and messy, so why shouldn’t the animation style reflect that? And the world-building is undeniably spectacular, an arid, savage, murky zone of conflict that seems to exist in a permanent halflight between day and night.

After an extended opening battle sequence that sees 19’s platoon reduced to a single soldier and a few garrulous memory chips, the picture really starts to hit its enjoyably odd stride. 19 finds himself targeted by an extravagantly French-accented sniper with a planet-sized ego and a taste – bizarrely – for Edith Piaf. There’s also a pair of opportunistic space scrap traders, voiced by Jemaine Clement and Matt Berry, who spot an opportunity to monetise 19 and his sentient equipment. Plus Hayley Atwell voices a female warrior named Venus Bluegenes who joins forces with 19 and his comrades and spends most of the final act beating up robots for kicks.

Not everything works, but there is much to admire in a picture which delivers plenty of space-ship crunching action and regional British insults but also manages to critique the cynical economic motivations of endless, pointless wars.