Rogue Trooper

The phrase ‘return to form’ seems fitting to Rogue Trooper for two reasons; it’s a story about super-soldiers overcoming fear through the miracle-science of rebirth, and can also be applied to filmmaker Duncan Jones building on the promise of earlier success after the derailment of 2018’s Mute. Where that film was pretentious and impenetrable, Rogue Trooper boisterously shouts its jokes, characters and story like a mountain-sized tank trundling across the battlefield. It’s in no way subtle, but it gets the job done.

In the far future, mankind has spread to the stars and developed cloning technology that enables super-soldiers to be reborn smarter and angrier after falling in battle. A squad of these beefcakes lands on Nu Earth, a scorched wasteland where they fight their German-enemies, the Nords. Who are they and why are they fighting them? Questions like those will get you shot. Best put them out of your head if you want to live, or enjoy the film.

You’d be forgiven for finding the first thirty minutes off-putting. The rush to deliver all the information you’ll need later can strain even the toughest footsoldier’s focus. Once you’ve got everything though it’s a wild ride that never lets up in pace, sucking you in like an airlock breach aboard a spaceship. The animated backgrounds look fantastic, even if the characters themselves at times appear a bit jittery. A jukebox soundtrack of oldies but goldies (very Fallout-esque, perhaps distractingly so at times) completes this grim, funny hellscape.

Where Rogue Trooper unquestionably succeeds is its humour. Adapted from the British comic strip of the same name, the film is at its absolute best when it produces the absurdist, morally-cruel laughs that seem to come from an unruly clone of Douglas Adams. Characters politely threatening to tear one another’s limbs off, the existential angst that comes from being alive outside your body, and a scene-stealing French sniper who kills to Edith Piaf tunes (played with a lovingly mocking accent by Peter Serafinowicz) add brilliant colour to the unending fight for survival.

Duncan Jones took nearly a decade to make this film, and his efforts appear to have paid off. All the squalid characters, gut-busting humour and extreme violence bespeaks a film that’s been crafted by one voice without the excessive input of studio and executive notes. For better or worse, Jones has made the exact bombastic and weird movie he wanted, and for that he deserves a twenty-one gun salute.