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It’s been in the works for years, but fans can finally see their first glimpse of the animated adaptation of 2000 AD’s future war hero with the release of the first official teaser trailer for Duncan Jones’ Rogue Trooper.

Based on the “future war” strip that debuted inside the iconic British anthology comic in 1981 — co-created by writer Gerry Finley-Day and future Watchmen artist Dave Gibbons — Rogue Trooper is an animated movie written and directed by Duncan Jones, who’s previously worked on Warcraft and the critically acclaimed Moon.

The concept of Rogue Trooper centers around the concept of cloned Genetic Infantrymen, soldiers designed and genetically modified to fight wars on alien planets and controlled by humans who purposefully stay far away from the action — with the added benefit of the soldiers’ personalities and experience being saved on ‘bio-chips’ that can be harvested post-death and implanted into new bodies or even equipment during combat. When a battalion of G.I.s are killed in action as the result of sabotage by a human traitor, the one survivor sets out on a mission to discover the traitor’s identity and revenge his fallen comrades.

The Rogue Trooper movie has been animated using motion capture directed by Jones and Unreal Engine animation by British independent production house Treehouse Digital. In a recent interview, Jones said, “I think one of the things that we learned early on is that the straight mo-cap was not going to work for our look. We have our characters, our G.I.s, who are these blue soldiers, and we try to skew them to feel as human as possible. And then all the rest of the human cast, we actually went more for a grotesque look and pushed them into more eccentric looks so that they actually balance out the more human G.I.s with everyone else who is actually human. But when you give raw motion-capture to the animators, it does often end up looking like a video game, and that was not appealing. So, we ended up going into a lot of hand animation on these characters.”

The release date of Rogue Trooper remains unclear, as do other details surround its release (such as, which studio will be responsible); the teaser leaves things vague with the caption “Coming soon-ish.” Per 2000 AD owners Rebellion Publishing in a press release, the movie is “due for release later this year.”

Check out the trailer below.

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