Extraction director Sam Hargrave isn’t going far from the field of battle for his next film, and he’s found another Marvel alum to headline it. Deadline reports Jake Gyllenhaal will star in Combat Control, which Hargrave will direct based on a Medal of Honor recipient’s true story.
MGM is close to acquiring Combat Control, which finds Gyllenhaal in the role of US Air Force Combat Controller John Allan Chapman, who was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor for his heroic rescue efforts in Operation Enduring Freedom during a battle with Al-Gaeda. He is the first airman to receive the award since the Vietnam War.
Hargrave will direct from a script by Michael Russell Gunn, who is adapting Dan Schilling and Lori Chapman Longfritz’s New York Times bestselling book Alone at Dawn. Gyllenhaal will not only star but exec-produce, with Schilling acting as a military advisor on the film.
The search is on for an actress to play Air Force Captain Cora Alexander, given the difficult task of investigating whether Chapman is worthy of receiving the medal.
Here’s how the film is described:
Combat Control will be based on the true story of Air Force CCT Chapman, who died in battle on March 4, 2002 in Afghanistan. Following his death, no one imagined it would take over a decade for the truth of what really happened on that snowy mountainside to emerge. Fifteen years later, Air Force Captain Cora Alexander is tasked with the nearly impossible job of investigating whether Chapman is a worthy recipient of the medal, despite no eyewitnesses to his actions and the top-secret world surrounding clandestine operations. Alexander has to uncover the truth, and in revealing Chapman’s sacrifice to the world, she forges her own path to self-forgiveness and personal redemption.
When Chapman was awarded the military’s highest award on August 22, 2018, the U.S. government allowed the release of his story, and that of the classified Combat Controllers, to the public, giving the world a glimpse into the smallest, most secretive and most highly decorated unit in the U.S. military. The medal was the first awarded to a CCT in U.S. history and the first awarded to a member of the Air Force since Vietnam.
Gyllenhaal is currently shooting the Michael Bay film, Ambulance. Combat Control marks his return to military dramas after Jarhead in 2005.
