Rogue Trooper Review: Duncan Jones' Cyberpunk War Cartoon Is Appealingly Irreverent [TIFF 2026]

The British comics magazine 2000 AD is a blind spot in my comics reading history that I really should correct. Alan Moore, Grant Morrison, Garth Ennis, and basically that whole crowd that went on to define Vertigo and the dark adult side of American comics in the '80s and '90s all got their start writing for that magazine. And Judge Dredd is the magazine's most famous character, thanks to two very different movie adaptations. Now Rogue Trooper, another 2000 AD character created by Gerry Finley-Day and "Watchmen" artist Dave Gibbons, is getting his big screen debut thanks to director Duncan Jones.

After watching the "Rogue Trooper" movie at the 2026 Toronto International Film Festival, I suspect the original comics must have been an influence on Jones' first movie, the sci-fi cult classic "Moon." Both "Moon" and "Rogue Trooper" are stories about cloned or genetically manufactured humans, built for dangerous space missions and designed to be replaceable, gaining awareness of their circumstances and, working alongside comedic mechanical sidekicks, turning on the powers that abuse them.

Where "Moon" is a small-scale more lit drama, however, "Rogue Trooper" is a much bigger action spectacle — though still an indie movie made outside the studio system. The solution to making a large-scale comic book war movie on an indie budget turns out to be animating it, with the video game graphics software Unreal Engine central to the production. The resulting visual style is a curious oddity, but the clear benefit of this approach is allowing the film's sense of anti-authoritarian irreverence and quirky British humor to come through unfiltered by any Hollywood homogenization.

"Rogue Trooper" has a lot of background to introduce. After an opening credits sequence showcasing art from the original comics, the film sets up the general background with a Star Wars-style opening crawl detailing the war between the Norts and Southers on Nu-Earth and the development of Genetic Infantrymen designed to survive the planet's toxic atmosphere with their brains stored in biochips in case their bodies die. Just when the exposition dump seems to be going a bit long, it ends with a wry comment about the Infantrymen's predicament along the lines of "seems a bit unfair, innit." That's the film's personality right there: just when it threatens to go overboard with the nerd lore, its comedy brings you right back in.

The story opens on a team of four Genetic Infantrymen — who as a result of a violent battle quickly become just one Genetic Infantryman, going by the number 19 (Aneurin Barnard) — and a collection of dead men's brain chips stored in the survivor's gun (voiced by Jack Lowden, the "Slow Horses" star rumored to be the next James Bond), helmet (Daryl McCormack), and backpack (Reece Shearsmith). Yes, this is an ultraviolent cyberpunk war movie where one of the main characters is a talking backpack. TIFF's description of the film notes the comics inspired aspects of "Warhammer 40K," "Star Wars: The Clone Wars," and James Cameron's "Avatar." Perhaps they also inspired "Dora the Explorer," though that might be more of a "great minds think alike" situation. Jokes aside, watching "Rogue Trooper" as a newbie is like a game of "did this come from this?" I already mentioned the similarities to "Moon," and I thought a lot about "Fallout" when it gets into its political satire.

It also works for a game of "name that voice," with all the beloved comedians and character actors scattered around this planet. Oh hey, there's Matt Berry and Jemaine Clement as skeezy war profiteers! Peter Serafinowicz doing a goofy French accent as Nort sniper Vichy! Sean Bean and Diane Morgan as 19's commanders! Hayley Atwell as Venus Bluegenes, a giant mech-fighting rogue superwoman who is almost certainly going to make certain corners of Bluesky go feral ... okay, you get the picture: it's a great voice cast, and the movie gets more fun the more that cast expands. 

Not only does the story of "Rogue Trooper" get more interesting the more weird directions it branches out in, but it felt to me as if the animation actively improved over the course of its runtime. I don't know if that's me getting more accustomed to the style or if the later scenes were animated later in the film's long production cycles. I think about action scenes in particular being better later in the film: the first act fights have a weightlessness to them that detracts from their visceral impact, while in contrast, in 19's beat-em-up against the giant mutant babies closer to the end of the film, you can feel every punch.

While the producers have said they didn't want the movie to be too video game-like, the fact of the matter is the animation does look like a video game. This sort of realistic-ish, mo-cap-enhanced animation rendered in this budget-friendly way inevitably looks like a game. The regular human characters are caricatured in a way that dodges strict realism and evokes the comic book, though textured in a way that still has one foot in the uncanny valley.

"Rogue Trooper" is a film made for a specific audience: people who enjoy a pretty good comedy episode of "Love Death + Robots." Not as mind-blowing as the best "Love Death + Robots" episodes, not as facile as the worst — just a solid bit of digitally animated cyberpunk action with a bunch of wacky jokes, a bit of heart (stick through the end credits for the director's dedication to the people of Ukraine), and enough over-the-top brutal deaths to make the Midnight Madness audience applaud. It's not transcendent, but if you like the type of thing it's doing, you will like this movie. I like this type of thing, and I might just want to check out some of those comics now.

"Rogue Trooper" premiered at the 2026 Annecy International Animation Film Festival. Looper screened it at the 2026 Toronto International Film Festival. Release plans have yet to be announced.