Duncan Jones’ Rogue Trooper Lands Its First Reviews at Annecy

Duncan Jones’ animated Rogue Trooper premiered at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival on June 22, 2026, and the first wave of reviews out of the festival lands broadly positive. The first review out of the festival opened with a Bowie reference and worked through a series of high-flown comparisons. The second review branding it an eccentric actioner praised its “bracingly sarcastic and pitch black humour.” And the third review celebrating its giant robots called the film “an absolute hoot.”

For Jones, the Annecy reception arrives as the first feature he has directed since the 2018 Netflix release Mute. It is also the most unlikely of canvases: an independently produced, R-rated animated war movie adapted from a British comic first published in 1981.

The First Reviews Out of Annecy

Deadline’s review, the first out of the festival, opens with a Bowie reference and works through a series of high-flown comparisons. “In some respects, Rogue Trooper is his Diamond Dogs, which Bowie modeled on George Orwell’s 1948 novel 1984,” the review reads, noting that Barnard “becomes an almost godlike presence by the end with his piercing white eyes.” The same review connected the film’s photorealist ambition to its budget, writing that on the world-building level, “on a big screen, Rogue Trooper is almost overwhelming.” Step back from the photoreal character work, the reviewer concluded, and the world-building becomes “jaw-dropping.”

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.

That line came in Deadline’s lead review from the Annecy premiere, which tagged the 2000 AD adaptation a “Fast, Funny, Visually Mind-Blowing Old-School War Movie.” The same review singled out the opening-credits sequence as “the best of the year,” set to Bear McCreary’s “tongue-in-cheek, faux-jingoistic theme ‘The Rogue Trooper March'” over black-and-white frames from the original comic. Deadline also flagged the photoreal character design as the film’s main weak spot, writing that “there’s still a few uncanny valleys to be crossed, notably in the up-close, full-body fighting sequences.” And it compared the film’s visual ambition to “Starship Troopers as made by René Laloux, the Disney-gone-Dalí director of the 1973 French cult classic Fantastic Planet.”

ScreenDaily’s take was more measured in its praise. The review acknowledged the photorealist animation will draw “comparisons with James Cameron’s Avatar pictures” but stressed the film is “distinctively British both in its sensibility (no Avatar earnestness here, just a bracingly sarcastic and pitch black humour) and its indie budget.” ScreenDaily tagged it an “eccentric, entertaining animated actioner” and concluded that the film “delivers plenty of space-ship crunching action and regional British insults but also manages to critique the cynical economic motivations of endless, pointless wars.” The review flagged “uncanny valley territory” in the photoreal character design but said the world-building is “undeniably spectacular, an arid, savage, murky zone of conflict.”

The Wrap, the third of the festival’s first reviews, leaned hardest into the comic’s visual vocabulary. The review described “a movie full of giant robots and blue soldiers and gargantuan crystals sticking out of the ground for no other reason than that they look cool” and imagined “some of the tableaus from the film airbrushed on the side of a van or on the cover of a heavy metal album from the late 1970s.” The review called the film “an absolute hoot” and credited Jones with a movie “made on a fraction of a typical Hollywood budget but just as ornate as anything in a blockbuster costing hundreds of millions more.”

Jones’ Eight-Year Climb Back to Form

Eight years is a long absence in any director’s career, and Jones used almost all of it. His last theatrical feature was the 2018 Netflix release Mute, a Berlin-set noir that arrived to muted reviews. Before that came Warcraft, the 2016 adaptation that tried to translate a video game universe to live action and ran into studio politics Jones has publicly called the most difficult experience of his career. Between Moon in 2009 and Source Code in 2011, Jones had looked like one of the most interesting science-fiction voices of his generation, and no fifth feature had arrived in the eight years since.

Rogue Trooper is the first feature Jones has directed since Mute, and it lands with a thesis: the path back runs through the small, the strange, and the kind of source material Hollywood usually does not touch. The production interview about the indie budget makes the philosophy explicit. Jones, asked about AI in the pipeline, answered flatly: “There’s AI,” he said, “the film has no AI.” Producer Stuart Fenegan, sitting beside him, credited the SAG strike window for the assembled voice cast: “We were actually really fortunate, for want of a better word, that when we were shooting, it was at the time when the SAG strike was happening.” The strike, Fenegan said, freed up actors who “would have been booked up and on other shows” and who said yes to the project “pretty much” unanimously.

How an Indie Budget Built a Blockbuster

Animation on a British indie price point was the structural gamble behind the project, and the crew built their own pipeline to make it work. The film was animated by Treehouse Digital using Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 5. Jones used a hybrid approach: face and voice mo-cap only, with the body work done later in animation.

Fenegan said the team was able to “bring what would be, you know, a 60 million plus studio movie down to a much indie budget.” They didn’t get there on Unreal alone. Two years into the production, the team “migrated out of Unreal” and used traditional animation software like Maya for much of the body work, “then a final re-render back in Unreal Engine.” Some four years in the making, the film is the longest gap between Jones features since his debut.

Distribution remains an open question. The team is working with CAA and “looking for distribution,” Fenegan told Variety, and no sales company is yet attached. “We’ve put so much effort into this and spent so much time on it, we really just want to make sure that we get this film in front of an audience,” Jones said. “As an indie film, that’s the scary thing because you don’t have a studio that’s there to make sure that the film gets out there. We’re at the point now where we just need to find a way to make sure that this film gets as many eyeballs as possible.”

• Animation studio: Treehouse Digital, on Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 5 with traditional Maya for body work and a final Unreal re-render
• Production companies: Rebellion Developments and Liberty Films
• Running time: 2 hours 5 minutes (125 minutes)
• World premiere: June 22, 2026, at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival
• Cast capture window: Two weeks, recorded under Equity contracts with no AI performances during the SAG strike

The 1981 Comic That Finally Reached the Screen

Rogue Trooper first appeared in 2000 AD in 1981, written by Gerry Finley-Day and drawn by Dave Gibbons. The Wrap’s review described the character as “perhaps the second most popular character to emerge from the publication after Judge Dredd.” In the strip, Rogue is a Genetic Infantryman, a blue-skinned clone whose memories can be downloaded into a chip and implanted into a fresh body.

Jones announced his plan to adapt the strip in July 2018, more than three years after a Grant Morrison project had fallen apart following the disappointing box office of Dredd in 2012. The film was originally scheduled for release in 2025 but has since been pushed to an unknown date. First-look images surfaced in June 2025, and the Annecy premiere on June 22, 2026 was the first time a finished cut was shown publicly. The Wikipedia entry on the film lists Jones as writer, director, and producer, with the screenplay credited to Finley-Day, Gibbons, and Jones.

The Deadline review, opening with a Bowie frame, noted that the opening credits of Rogue Trooper play out over black-and-white frames from the original comic. Jones is given a director credit “in a well-earned speech bubble that says, quite simply, ‘BTHOOM!'” The original 2000 AD creators received their own on-screen credit at the start of the film.

The chip conceit carries through into the film. The dead squadmates travel with Rogue as a talking helmet, a talking gun, and a talking backpack. ScreenDaily noted that the three “are able to chat with each other, in regional British accents, through chip-to-chip communication, but also, despite the lack of mouths and vocal cords, seem to be able to speak to other characters.” Deadline added that 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.” The 1981 strip is one of the longest-gestating properties in British comics to reach the screen, and the film preserves its central conceit intact.

A Talking Backpack, a Talking Helmet, a Talking Gun

Aneurin Barnard voices 19, the Genetic Infantryman who survives the opening mission and is left to find the traitor in his ranks. Hayley Atwell plays Venus Bluegenes, a fellow rebel trooper. Three of 19’s dead squadmates are uploaded into a helmet, a gun, and a backpack, and they trade lines with each other in regional British accents through chip-to-chip communication, even though they have no mouths or vocal cords.

Supporting voices include Alice Lowe and Peter Serafinowicz, the latter voicing a French-accented sniper with a taste for Edith Piaf in a role Deadline singled out. Bear McCreary wrote the score, and the production design leans on the comic’s visual vocabulary, with Gibbons’ original artwork cited as a touchstone by Jones. The Wrap noted the actors take on more personality after being untethered from their corporeal forms, a point the review connected back to the original comic’s anti-war, anti-authoritarian streak.

An Indie Film, No Sales Company Yet

For now, Rogue Trooper is a finished film without a release date. The original 2025 cinema target has slipped to an unspecified date. The production is still shopping the project for distribution with CAA. No sales company is attached at the time of the Annecy premiere. Jones, asked about a sequel, was focused on the present.

Critics who saw the Annecy cut flagged the same thing the production has been working against: the photoreal character design is, in ScreenDaily’s words, “deep in uncanny valley territory,” and the up-close fighting sequences can look rough on a small screen. Step back, and the world-building reads as “jaw-dropping,” per Deadline, with Barnard becoming “an almost godlike presence by the end with his piercing white eyes.” On the strength of the Annecy showing, the case for an audience is there.

The 1981 strip is one of the longest-gestating properties in British comics to reach the screen. Distribution, Jones said, is the next problem to solve. The team is now looking for a sales company and a distributor, with no announcement yet.