Rogue Trooper trailer: Duncan Jones drags 2000 AD’s blue soldier to the BFI London Film Festival (trailer).
The Rogue Trooper trailer has arrived, and Duncan Jones has finally dragged 2000 AD’s blue-skinned killing machine onto a screen after the better part of eight years spent telling anyone within earshot that he was absolutely going to. It plays the BFI London Film Festival in October as part of the Cult strand, which is where British genre cinema traditionally goes to be appreciated by people who already own the trade paperbacks.
Three screenings, for those planning a diary raid. Vue West End on Friday 9th October at 20:30, the Prince Charles downstairs screen on Monday 12th October at 20:35, and Curzon Soho at noon on Friday 16th October. Tickets go on sale on 17th September at ten in the morning, and BFI members get in a week earlier, which is the sort of arrangement that has been quietly funding cultural institutions since the invention of the queue. The Prince Charles is obviously the correct answer. A film about doomed infantry in a poisoned wasteland deserves a basement.
The source material dates to 1981, when Gerry Finley-Day and Dave Gibbons dropped Rogue into the pages of 2000 AD, and it remains one of the sharpest premises British comics ever produced. Nu-Earth is a world so comprehensively poisoned that both sides had to genetically redesign their own infantry simply to breathe the air they were fighting over, which is either a searing anti-war metaphor or an admirably thorough piece of procurement, depending on your mood. Rogue is the last Genetic Infantryman standing after the Quartz Zone Massacre, hunting the traitor who sold his unit out, and carrying his three dead friends with him: Gunnar in the rifle, Bagman in the backpack, Helm in the helmet. It is grief that talks back, argues with you, and complains about being carried uphill. Forty-five years on, nobody has improved on it.
Aneurin Barnard voices 19, and the supporting bench is a fairly comprehensive raid on British screen acting: Hayley Atwell, Sean Bean, Matt Berry, Jemaine Clement, Jack Lowden, Diane Morgan, Alice Lowe, Reece Shearsmith, Asa Butterfield and Daryl McCormack. Casting Sean Bean here is a magnificent joke that presumably nobody involved could resist, because this is a production in which dying is not a career setback but a change of format. Bean can meet his customary contractual fate and then keep talking from inside somebody’s rucksack for another ninety minutes. Somewhere, an agent is weeping with joy.
Matt Berry’s presence deserves separate mention, because the biochip concept reaches its logical conclusion the moment one item of your webbing sounds like Matt Berry. Any tactical advantage this confers is entirely offset by the volume. Bear McCreary provides the score, so expect percussion with opinions.
The technical story is genuinely interesting. Principal photography wrapped in 2024 using head-mounted performance capture, with the data processed into Unreal Engine 5 and finished by Liberty Films’ own animation team. Jones has been notably emphatic that there is no artificial intelligence anywhere in the film, a statement carrying a certain irony given that his picture is about downloading dead soldiers’ personalities onto chips and plugging them into your equipment. Nu-Earth appears to have settled the ethics of synthetic minds rather more decisively than the film industry has managed.
There is a slightly bleak footnote to how that cast came together. The producers have cheerfully admitted that the 2023 strikes left a great many actors unexpectedly at liberty, and that a project offering a genuinely novel way of working found itself with an open goal. Assembling an all-star ensemble out of an industrial dispute over artificial intelligence, for a film about resurrected soldiers, is the sort of coincidence that would be rejected from a screenplay for being too neat.
Jones has described his own script as what you would get if Guardians of the Galaxy had a baby with The Raid, which is a pitch of admirable clarity. The BFI’s programme notes call it fast and funny, and reckon Jones has given a British indie the feel of a Hollywood blockbuster, which is the polite industry way of saying somebody worked miracles with the budget.
It is worth remembering how thin the ground is here. 2000 AD has produced exactly two significant film adaptations to date, and the record is not glorious: the 1995 Judge Dredd, in which Sylvester Stallone removed the helmet roughly as fast as human hands allow, and 2012’s Dredd, which was superb and which almost nobody went to see. Animation was probably always the sensible route for Rogue, if only because it spares everybody the tedious business of explaining why the leading man is blue.
The BFI attaches a content warning for graphic violence and injury, which feels like an act of considerable optimism regarding a film set on a planet where the atmosphere itself is a weapon system. It runs to 120 minutes by the festival’s listing, arriving in London after its world premiere at Annecy in June.
Here at SFcrowsnest we have waited a long time for this one. Three dead mates, one furious survivor and a war nobody can remember starting. Bring a gas mask.
