I’m assuming all of you can figure out the plot from this: “Netflix has shared a first look at its upcoming World War II film, Operation Mincemeat, and this sounds like it’s going to be a wild and unique film. The film tells the true story of two British intelligence officers who “try to turn the tide of World War II by recruiting an unlikely agent: a dead man.”” Yeah, it’s about the corpse they dressed up as a Royal Navy officer with fake papers stating that the Allies wouldn’t be invading Sicily.
It worked like a charm, too: the corpse washed up on the Spanish coast, the Spanish made copies of the papers and sent them to the Germans, and the Germans didn’t put enough guys in Sicily. Just as expected. The thing is: where’s the drama and tension? The actual action is, “We threw the corpse overboard, and let the current do the rest.” Which is exactly the kind of excitement I want to see out of a real-life clandestine military operation – i.e., none – but it’s not very cinematic, is it?
Oh, well, they’ll probably have people squabbling at each other. Or make up a U-boat attack. That’s what writers are for.
Operation: Weekend at Bernie’s
More seriously, they could tell the story of the guy who died, or do something like Taking Chance did. Tell a story around the corpse
The guy who died was a vagrant, iirc. So there’s likely not much of a story there. It’s even possible that nothing is really known about the unfortunate body aside from his pre-deceased status as a vagrant.
This could make for an interesting comedy, as British Intelligence scrambles to try and put together a body that will pass muster (which can be somewhat difficult; the local Chinese tried to dress up an executed criminal as a Nationalist soldier in Shanghai shortly before fighting started there with the Japanese, but failed miserably).
Look up “the man who never was”, which I am fairly certain told this story in the seventies. It wasn’t great, but there was a bit of tension since they didn’t include the bit that the German intelligence apparatus in Britain was wholly suborned by the British.