‘Rogue Trooper’ First Look: Duncan Jones Unveils His Dystopian War Machine

EXCLUSIVE: The problem with animation is that it just takes so long. So long, in fact, that Liberty Films issued a wrap announcement on their new film in December of 2023, and, when this interview took place earlier this month, were still tinkering with it, adding a few very last-minute bells and whistles. “Several people have been like, ‘Oh, I thought you’d given up on that,” says producer Stuart Fenegan. “But we haven’t given up on it, it’s just that figuring out a new way of making a CG movie takes a while.”

The film marks the return of Moon director Duncan Jones and explains what he’s been up to since 2018’s Mute, an underrated sci-fi set in the seedy underbelly of a near-future Berlin. Though it might not look like it, his vibrantly colorful and inventive new film sees him return to his low-budget, indie roots; titled Rogue Trooper, it is based on a strip in the long-running UK comic 2000 AD, which Jones describes as “essentially the Marvel/DC of the UK”.

Like many of 2000 AD’s strips, Rogue Trooper comes with a very high-concept premise, which is that, in the future, soldiers will have their military skills and personalities transferred onto a microchip that can then be downloaded into a new host, human or otherwise. Which is how number 19, aka the Rogue Trooper (Aneurin Barnard), comes to find himself caught behind enemy lines with a very odd platoon: Gunnar (voiced by Jack Lowden), his rifle; Bagman (Reece Shearsmith), his backpack; and Helm (Daryl McCormack), his helmet. Comedy icon Ade Edmonson even has a cameo — as a pair of boots.

It’s a sign of how long this film has been gestating that real-world wars were far from Jones’s mind when he began it. “It’s a much more old-fashioned version of how wars work than what is happening now for real,” he says. Here, Jones and Fenegan explain the film’s long, strange journey to the big screen.

DEADLINE: When did you first discover 2000 AD?

DUNCAN JONES: When I was a kid I used to travel quite a lot, and wherever there was a magazine store often you would see 2000 AD, it would be in the small English-language sector where they’d have the Herald Tribune and other newspapers. They would have 2000 AD and sometimes Eagle comic in the bit for kids. So, I started getting into it way back then and absolutely loved it. I’ve just been a fan ever since.

They had a couple of [flagship] characters. Judge Dredd is the one that’s best known, and that’s the one that’s had a couple of shots at the bat. The most recent version, Dredd [2012], with Karl Urban, was quite a while ago now. I thought it was really good fun. But, since then, I think they’ve been very cautious in how they move forward in making more films based on their IP, and Stuart and I have been pestering them for a very long time. And we convinced them that, together, we could make something they’d be really happy with.

DEADLINE: What was it about Rogue Trooper that made you want to do that?

JONES: They’ve got an absolute treasure trove of characters, and there’s a lot of them that I would’ve been gagging to do and absolutely would love the chance to do. But Rogue was always the one that felt most appealing to me. It’s funny, when I was in school, I was a big fan of Plato’s Republic and the tripartite division of the soul between the head, the stomach, and the heart. And I always read Rogue Trooper thinking of that division of the soul, with the characters of Bagman, Gunnar to and Helm. And when we started making the film, I finally had the opportunity to talk to the authors and ask them if that had been in their thinking. Obviously, it wasn’t. [Laughs.] It wasn’t at all! but it meant something to me.

DEADLINE: The premise is quite hard to take onboard, even though it’s explained in the opening crawl. But then by the end, they’re a platoon.

JONES: It just feels natural. It feel like a group of guys, a band of brothers.

DEADLINE: Stuart, what were your thoughts?

STUART FENEGAN: I came to 2000 AD and Rogue Trooper through Duncan. When we started working together, Duncan expressed his excitement about Rogue and I started reading the comic at that point. I remember him telling me the story of how when he was at film school, he went straight to Jason and Chris Kingsley [at Rebellion Developments], who had just bought the 2000 AD catalog in 2000 and was like, “I’d love to make Rogue Trooper.” And they were like, “Yeah, OK, maybe make a few films first.”

But as Duncan said, it really is the British counterpart to those comic book universes, and the opportunity to make what felt to me like a British Guardians of the Galaxy felt really cool. The thing that really amused me is that at the beginning of the process, Duncan had written this great adaptation and script. And to start our process off, he recorded absolutely every character, every line of dialogue, and put the whole thing down as a two-hour radio play.

JONES: With silly voices.

FENEGAN: Which I cannot wait to put on a DVD or Blu-ray as a special feature — you’ll see Duncan’s voice-acting talent. But that really gave us an opportunity to galvanize what the project was, and then we started working on an animatic to that soundtrack that would really show everybody what we wanted to do.

DEADLINE: How did you come up with the look of the film? It’s so unique.

JONES: Yeah, it’s genuinely organic. It’s a genuinely organic look that came about through an iterative process. We began with storyboards and little videos of me and my editor, Barrett Heathcote, running around the garden reenacting bits and then sticking it all together and editing a film together, then making an animatic with the Unreal Engine, which was something we used as part of the process. But we didn’t know where we were going. We had this wonderful artist who actually we eventually requested become our production designer, Stephen Trumble, and he was giving us all of this fantastic concept artwork as we were going along. And we just kept on nudging it along, and changing things as we went, until we found something that holistically worked for the whole movie.

FENEGAN: Something that captured some of that 2000 AD vibe and aesthetic, because it’s very much its own thing.

JONES: That was always the North Star. If we were going to make a comic-book movie, it should feel like a comic-book movie by the end of it. That’s what we were working towards. There was this amazing one-off 2000 AD book called War Machine.

It had this beautiful artwork in it that was almost like this watercolor look to it. And that, as far as the look of the movie, was something I was always pushing us towards — a way to make it feel almost like it was colored with watercolors.

FENEGAN: Stephen Trumble, the artist that Duncan mentioned, is part of a really amazing bespoke animation company called Treehouse down in Bournemouth in the south of England. And we started working with them from Duncan’s radio-play audio file, putting an animatic together, with Steve doing those designs. As you know, we started working with the Unreal Engine to do the animatic, but one of the things that was really important to us was to make sure that we found that animation style that wouldn’t invite parallels being drawn to it being a video game movie. We really wanted to try and find that 2000 AD DNA.

And also, there was an amazing character designer called Doriana Re there who literally would plow through the comic books and keep doing different drawings and send them through to Duncan and try and find that slightly stylized but not-too-caricatured look. We never wanted to get into that uncanny-valley video game aesthetic. We really wanted to find that theatrical animation style for this 2000 AD universe.

DEADLINE: How would you describe it? You’ve described it as an animation, but is it strictly animation? It’s not motion capture for sure. Is there a technical term for the process?

JONES: No.

FENEGAN: We can make one up if you like.

JONES: The process is very much something that we have come up with that allows us to do a film like this as an independent British film. I think one of the things that we learned early on is that the straight mocap was not going to work for our look. We have our characters, our GIs, who are these blue soldiers, and we try to skew them to feel as human as possible. And then all the rest of the human cast, we actually went more for a grotesque look and pushed them into more eccentric looks so that they actually balance out the more human GIs with everyone else who is actually human.

But when you give raw motion-capture to the animators, it does often end up looking like a video game, and that was not appealing. So, we ended up going into a lot of hand animation on these characters. We did some stunt work with an amazing stunt team that we used, who did some mocap for the fight sequences. But even then, our team of artists got in there and just started manipulating things.

DEADLINE: Duncan, what was your concept for this dystopia? Is it very heavily based on the comic book or did you bring your own imagination to it?

JONES: Yeah, it is based on the episodic nature of the storytelling and the fact that we visit all of these different characters in different environments is very much in keeping with the comic. But I had a little bit of fun with it and added a few things and tried to take some of the original stories and add my own spin on it. I can’t help myself doing that, I always do that. [Laughs.] I got in trouble with that in Warcraft.

That was the approach to the storytelling. As far as the visuals went, it’s a combination of things, keeping in the spirit of the artwork from the comic book. And then Steve Trumble and I talked about Thunderbirds and things like that, and the supersized vehicles. So, we had a lot of fun with these ridiculously gigantic vehicles, because the story takes place in a fairly small environment. But the scale of it, I think, we sell with these giant vehicles and these fun action moments, especially the big tank at the start of the film, which is our Bond-like set piece to open the movie.

FENEGAN: I’ll counterpoint that from a production point of view — the world was absolutely massive. There’s dozens of characters. I think we cast every British comedian that’s ever, ever walked the earth.

JONES: Sorry! So, just to jump in on there — I really wanted to lean into the Britishness of its origins. Of the fact that Rogue Trooper came from 2000 AD, it’s very much got this punk political sensibility, and I wanted to just cast it up with as many people from Europe in general, but mainly from the UK. There’s one or two Americans, but I wanted it to feel like the British independent film that it was, so that’s how we approached it.

DEADLINE: Obvious question, is there a Rogue Trooper universe?

FENEGAN: Look, I think we’ve all gone out on a limb and approached Rogue Trooper as an animated movie in a really new way. So, I think we’re concentrating on releasing this, and then obviously, if it’s a success, it would be amazing to continue to play in that style, in that universe. As Duncan said, there’s so many amazing characters in that world.

DEADLINE: Any favorites in particular, or is it too early to say?

JONES: There’s lots of favorites. I think 2000 AD’s got an amazing library of characters, and I think what’s great about them is that they don’t feel like the same man and woman, just in a different uniform, which some comic movies tend to feel like. There’s some really interesting, bizarre stories that are in 2000 AD for those who want to have a play. Again, leaning into the Britishness or at least the Europeanness of 2000 AD, I would love to see more British filmmakers come on board and make this a bit of a renaissance for the kinds of British films that we haven’t really ever had the chance to make. The way that we made Rogue Trooper really does open up the opportunity to do some things at this scale on a UK indie budget. [Laughs.] Come and join us. It’ll be fun.

Rogue Trooper is being sold by Liberty Film’s Stuart Fenegan and CAA Media Finance