Operation Mincemeat

For the second time in a week, I've watched a movie that takes place during World War II, where the battles and bloodshed are secondary or even tertiary to another story. In this case, the story is related to the action, but still, guns and explosions are almost entirely absent from this movie. Instead, the story concerns the very real titular operation to use disinformation to rattle Hitler and draw him away from a battlefront with an almost cartoonish idea: use a dead body with fake top secret papers to insinuate the next major military operation by the Allies would be launched at Greece instead of Sicily, as everyone and their mother expected. This sounds like a simple idea, but for the people involved, it becomes a months-long ordeal. The higher-ups in the military don't believe in the plan, despite Churchill singing off on it. And because they know the German espionage division will do their homework, they have to give the dead body a convincing cover story. Doing so involves a ton of detail -- military ID, establishing details in the real world to support the fake documents, and most inconveniently, a letter from a fake love interest. The details of this fake love interest begins to bleed into the lives of the people building the fake life of this fake soldier If that all sounds a bit soap opera-ish, yeah, it kind of is. I have no idea if the co-workers really had feelings for one another, or the love triangle that develops, but in this case, I also get that if the movie were just the military planning and execution of the dead body scheme, it would be a movie as dry as a desert at high noon. It's a necessary evil, but it still kind of feels like a distraction. You wouldn't think that the logistics of the plan would be able to take up nearly two hours, but they do, and never once does it feel padded. Not only credit it to a well-written script, but good acting from all involved, who manage to keep every scene moving and intriguing. If you don't know the real history of Operation Mincemeat (which I didn't), the movie never tips its hand as to whether or not it succeeds, and if it does, to what degree. You'd think because they made a movie of it, it must succeed, but the idea is so ludicrous, with ways it could fall apart at every step, it seems destined for failure, which gives the movie actual intrigue. That's some smart direction. So, yeah, good movie. Made me go check out the real history of it, which should be the goal of any historical movie like this. If you want explosions and blood, wrong movie. But if you want to see real-life espionage and disinformation at work in the weirdest way possible, this is a pretty good two hours.