‘Rogue Trooper’ Review: Duncan Jones’ Visually Mind-Blowing War Movie

With his fifth film, Duncan Jones reveals that he was always more of a futurologist than a sci-fi guy, even though, like the films that preceded it, Rogue Trooper is another look into the black mirror of technology. Like father, like son, you might think, given that Jones’ famous father David Bowie never met a ’topia he couldn’t wait to diss. But while there is really no other overlap between the two artists’ work, it’s striking now that while Jones Sr. was very much a glass-half-empty kind of guy — “Five Years”, “Panic in Detroit”, even “Space Oddity” — Jones Jr. is still in thrall to the wonders of what H.G. Wells was thinking about when he penned William Cameron Menzies’s Things To Come (1936).

In some respects, Rogue Trooper is his Diamond Dogs (the concept album, not just the single), which Bowie modelled on George Orwell’s 1948 novel 1984. Jones Jr., however, looked to a less likely oracle for the basis of his first foray into full-blown animation — the gritty cult UK comic book 2000AD — to fashion a fast-paced, satirical, and often visually mind-blowing war movie that plays out like Starship Troopers as made by René Laloux, the Disney-gone-Dalí director of the 1973 French cult classic Fantastic Planet.

First a few notes on 2000AD and its place in British pop culture. While the UK has always had a very strong contingent of science-fiction authors, their names rarely trouble the pantheon of great writers. 2000AD was always at the sharp end of that, arriving in the UK in the hiatus between the first and second singles by punk legends the Sex Pistols. Comic books until then had been strictly boys’-own adventures, with titles like Eagle and Hotspur, that gave young boys permission to revel in the grim 20^th-century wars their fathers had fought in.

2000AD took the form of those same comic strips — dying figures with huge speech bubbles that scream “AIIEE!!!” — but slyly subverted the context to deliver an anti-war, anti-authoritarian message. Jones lays some of this aesthetic in the opening credits, the best of the year alongside Jane Schoenbrun’s Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma: While Bear McCreary’s tongue in cheek, faux-jingoistic theme “The Rogue Trooper March” plays, Jones uses black-and-white frames from the original comic-book, giving his director credit a well-earned speech bubble that says, quite simply, “BTHOOM”!

Like most post-Star Wars fantasy movies, Rogue Trooper starts with a crawl, and this is a long one, which will perhaps be a deciding factor for audiences expecting a quick hit. The premise is that, somewhere far away, two rival factions — the Norts and the Southers — are fighting over the toxic planet Nu Earth. Vital to the Southers’ battle plan is the use of genetic infantrymen, a battalion of clones whose thoughts can be downloaded on to a chip and reused if the host body is destroyed. It’s a tough concept at first, but it does explain how — after a particularly violent opening mission — platoon leader Rogue (Aneurin Barnard) comes into possession of a talking helmet (Daryl McCormack), a wise-cracking backpack (Reece Shearsmith), and a sentient gun (Jack Lowden).

Like most war films, the war being fought by the lower downs is very different to the war being fought by the higher-ups, and when Rogue begins to suspect that his platoon has been sent behind enemy lines by a traitor in their midst, he decides to go… well, rogue. From here, the film becomes a fantastical Apocalypse Now-style journey upstream through the hell of war, which takes Rogue through wild vignettes populated by a series of grotesques, showing the likes of Diane Morgan, Jemaine Clement and especially Hayley Atwell (who plays the ass-kicking Venus Bluegenes) as you’ve never seen them before.

The comedy doesn’t always land, just as it sometimes didn’t in the underrated Mute, but the bold choice here is to go broadly British and bathetic rather than ape the increasingly boring wisecracking style of the Marvel/DC movies. Likewise, despite the filmmakers’ best efforts, there’s still a few uncanny valleys to be crossed, notably in the up-close, full-body fighting sequences, which remind us how much VFX isn’t quite there yet. On the other hand, however, take a step back and the world-building is jaw-dropping; on a big screen, Rogue Trooper is almost overwhelming, and Barnard becomes an almost god-like presence by the end with his piercing white eyes (don’t worry, it’s explained).  

It’s not exactly going to keep the James Cameron who made Avatar up at night, but it absolutely is in the spirit of the sadly lesser-spotted James Cameron who made the first Terminator movie. Who knows where it will take us? Will the real future of futuristic futures start here? Let’s hope so.