{"id":1043749,"date":"2026-06-22T22:47:17","date_gmt":"2026-06-22T22:47:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/1043749\/"},"modified":"2026-06-22T22:47:17","modified_gmt":"2026-06-22T22:47:17","slug":"rogue-trooper-review-duncan-jones-visually-mind-blowing-war-movie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/1043749\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Rogue Trooper\u2019 Review: Duncan Jones\u2019 Visually Mind-Blowing War Movie"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tWith his fifth film, Duncan Jones<\/a> reveals that he was always more of a futurologist than a sci-fi guy, even though, like his films that preceded it, Rogue Trooper<\/a> is another look into the black mirror of technology. Like father, like son, you might think, given that Jones\u2019 famous father David Bowie never met a \u2019topia he couldn\u2019t wait to diss. But while there is really no other overlap between the two artists\u2019 work, it\u2019s striking now that while Jones Sr. was very much a glass-half-empty kind of guy \u2014 \u201cFive Years,\u201d \u201cPanic in Detroit,\u201d even \u201cSpace Oddity\u201d\u00a0\u2014 Jones Jr. is still in thrall to the wonders of what H.G. Wells was thinking about when he penned William Cameron Menzies\u2019s Things to Come (1936).<\/p>\n

\n\tIn some respects, Rogue Trooper is his Diamond Dogs (the concept album, not just the single), which Bowie modeled on George Orwell\u2019s 1948 novel 1984. Jones Jr., however, looked to a less likely oracle for the basis of his first foray into full-blown animation \u2014 the gritty cult UK comic book 2000AD \u2014 to fashion a fast-paced, satirical and often visually mind-blowing war movie that plays out like Starship Troopers as made by Ren\u00e9 Laloux, the Disney-gone-Dal\u00ed director of the 1973 French cult classic Fantastic Planet.<\/p>\n

\n\tFirst, a few notes on 2000AD and its place in British pop culture. While the UK always has had a very strong contingent of science-fiction authors, their names rarely trouble the pantheon of great writers. 2000AD always was at the sharp end of that, arriving in the UK during the hiatus between the first and second singles by punk legends the Sex Pistols. Comic books until then had been strictly boys\u2019-own adventures, with titles like Eagle and Hotspur, that gave young boys permission to revel in the grim 20th century wars their fathers had fought in.<\/p>\n

\n\t2000AD took the form of those same comic strips \u2014 dying figures with huge speech bubbles that scream \u201cAIIEE!!!\u201d \u2014 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\u2019s Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma: While Bear McCreary\u2019s tongue-in-cheek, faux-jingoistic theme \u201cThe Rogue Trooper March\u201d 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, \u201cBTHOOM\u201d!<\/p>\n

\n\tRELATED: <\/strong>The 61 Movies That Have Made More Than $1 Billion At The Global Box Office<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

\n\tLike 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 \u2014 the Norts and the Southers \u2014 are fighting over the toxic planet Nu Earth. Vital to the Southers\u2019 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\u2019s a tough concept at first, but it does explain how \u2014 after a particularly violent opening mission \u2014 platoon leader Rogue (Aneurin Barnard<\/a>) comes into possession of a talking helmet (Daryl McCormack), a wise-cracking backpack (Reece Shearsmith), and a sentient gun (Jack Lowden).<\/p>\n

\n\tLike 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 \u2026 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<\/a>, Jemaine Clement<\/a> and especially Hayley Atwell<\/a> (who plays the ass-kicking Venus Bluegenes) as you\u2019ve never seen them before.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe comedy doesn\u2019t always land, just as it sometimes didn\u2019t 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\u2019 best efforts, there\u2019s still a few uncanny valleys to be crossed, notably in the up-close, full-body fighting sequences, which remind us how much VFX isn\u2019t 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 godlike presence by the end with his piercing white eyes (don\u2019t worry, it\u2019s explained). \u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tIt\u2019s 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\u2019s hope so.<\/p>\n

\n\tTitle: <\/strong>Rogue Trooper
Festival: <\/strong>Annecy<\/a> Film Festival
Director: <\/strong>Duncan Jones
Screenwriters: <\/strong>Gerry Finley-Day, Dave Gibbons, Duncan Jones
Voice vast: <\/strong>Aneurin Barnard, Hayley Atwell, Sean Bean, Matt Berry, Asa Butterfield, Jemaine Clement, Jack Lowden, Alice Lowe, Daryl McCormack, Diane Morgan, Reece Shearsmith
Running time: <\/strong>2 hr 5 mins<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"With his fifth film, Duncan Jones reveals that he was always more of a futurologist than a sci-fi…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1043750,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[3935],"tags":[287310,217397,287311,23596,77,44869,280493,3943,6080,287312,16,15],"class_list":["post-1043749","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-aneurin-barnard","tag-annecy","tag-diane-morgan","tag-duncan-jones","tag-entertainment","tag-hayley-atwell","tag-jemaine-clement","tag-movies","tag-review","tag-rogue-trooper","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1043749","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1043749"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1043749\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1043750"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1043749"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1043749"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1043749"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}