Beyond Fest Review: Rogue Trooper is a resounding dud that feels like it'll never end

The planet of Nu-Earth is covered in poisonous gas, along with lots of otherwise quite inhospitable terrain. To my eyes, it doesn't much look like a planet you'd go to war over, but so it is. Two factions, the Norts and the Southers, are embroiled in a never-ending war. But the Southers might finally have the upper hand with their new breed of super-soldier, called Genetic Infantrymen, who learn from each death. These blue-skinned beings aren't affected by the planet's poisonous atmosphere, so they can move about with less gear. No masks (they should hit up The Last Ditch on Saturday nights). And when they die in battle, the chip in their head can be recovered and put into a new body, saving their personality, skills, memory, the whole shebang. This lets them put them gain extensive experience that should make them the most skilled fighters on the battlefield.

In Duncan Jones' Rogue Trooper, which is based on the comic from the long-running British sci-fi comic publication 2000AD, war is (and will always be) the only life these Genetic Infantrymen ever know. They were built for war, live for war, and will die (again and again and again) for war. They're seen somewhat as pawns in the army, disposable, but also as the best bet the Southers have in toppling the Norts once and for all. 

We follow 19 (Aneurin Barnard) and his comrades as they go for a mission behind enemy lines. On landing, they're separated from the rest of their G.I.s, but they make the most of it, pulling off an impressive infiltrate-and-destroy mission that deals a nice blow. But along the way, 19 ends up by himself, having rescued the chips of a few of his fellow soldiers after they fell. Without the usual chip storage handy, those soldiers end up taking up consciousness in some of 19's gear: his backpack (Bagman), helmet (Helm), and gun (Gunnar). So this one soldier and his gear are a tiny band of brothers, trying to find their way back to base so the item-ized guys can get back into proper bodies, and 19 can warn high command about a potential traitor in their midst (the rest of the G.I.s were ambushed immediately upon landing -- someone knew).

It's a nifty sci-fi set-up, and Rogue Trooper does a decent job of getting its board set. The opening credits wear the film's comic book origins proudly, recreating various panels from the strip over a rousing fanfare of music. It was enough to get my blood pumping in the Egyptian Theatre, where the film made its US premiere on Saturday as part of Beyond Fest here in LA. After the opening credits, the film does a Star Wars-style crawl to fill us in on important story information, and then we're off to the races.

But man, this is a poorly-run race. My curiosity and enthusiasm were pretty quickly put down, and that just continued throughout the film's 2-hour-and-change runtime. Rogue Trooper is a slog, nearly a total dud, a misfire -- however you want to call it. Here's a film where there's clearly so much love to the source material, and so much work was put into bringing it to the big screen, but it's poorly-tuned and -paced, and the obnoxious humor is the rotten cheery atop the rapidly-melting sundae.

The humor is one of my biggest issues with the movie. It feels like it's going for that bland Marvel brand of comedy, where nearly every moment needs to be undercut with a joke lest audiences get bored for even a moment. But here, the comedic sensibility tilts a little too far to the side, and we land somewhere closer to Borderlands (the movie, specifically -- I'm not familiar with the games). Some of the characters are just obnoxious, and the need for constant jokes feels at odd with the overall tone of the film, which is quite dreary. Part of that might be the setting -- nearly every area 19 encounters is just rocks and smokes, not exactly exciting to look at -- but also because we're subjected to endless reminders about what's going on. It's so repetitive, so many characters re-litigating and mentioning plot points again and again. Maybe it's fear that audience members who don't know the source material will get lost? (I did occasionally feel a little lost, but it was more that I had trouble understanding some of the line readings.)

One exception the the dismal state of the film's comedy is one of its villains: the flamboyant sniper Vichy, who has a love for Edith Piaf and a flair for the dramatic (read: pretty sure he's gay). Vichy is easily the best character in the movie, and feels like he's beaming in from a more confidently weird movie than the humdrum sci-fi we're relegated to watching here. His line readings are great, his gun is cool, the way he skips and prances around is a delight. I wish the rest of the movie were closer to the wavelength he's operating on, because it would be way more fun if it were.

It's a shame the comedy is so grating, because Jones has gathered a strong cast here, including some heavyweight comedic geniuses like Diane Morgan, Jemaine Clement, and Matt Berry (who are three of the stand-out performances). The characters bear their actors' likenesses, albeit twisted and caricatured into still-but-sometimes-barely recognizable forms. The cast also includes Sean Bean, Daryl McCormack, Asa Butterfield...pretty stacked.

The animation is likely to be a sticking point for many, and understandably so. The film uses Unreal Engine 5, and thus the movie sometimes looks like a video game, for better or for worse. (This certainly is a movie that can get away with looking like a video game.) There are certain shots that you might mistake for live-action if you didn't look too closely, while other times, the film looks quite ugly and bizarre. Part of it comes down to the variety of characters, some of whom look like real people (albeit blue-skinned), while others are garishly cartoony in their proportions and facial features. Clement's character, in particular, looks really wild. I spent the whole movie wrestling with if I minded the animation or not -- it's certainly not boring, even if a lot of the settings are. Too often, it felt like it was wandering into Uncanny Valley territory, like a Zemeckis animated feature. Your results may vary.

What kills me is that, after a slog of a movie where every scene is too long, there's barely any story, and character development is nowhere to be found, the movie doesn't even bother to properly end. It makes the whole exercise feel like an overstuffed pilot episode for a TV show, like "Yeah, that's our world, make sure you come back to see the actual story!" It felt like a slap in the face after watching such a bad movie, and didn't accomplish its ostensible goal of making me wish for another entry. I hope I never see these characters again.