As our military is learning right now, superior firepower isn’t always enough to win a war. In WWII, the Allied forces knew this, and employed sophisticated deception schemes to fool the enemy and set the stage for D-Day. This plot is at the center of Simon West’s new film, Fortitude, a reunion with his Con Air and Stolen actor Nicolas Cage.
Fortitude has a script by Simon Afram, and stars Matthew Goode and Ed Skrein as British intelligence operatives Thomas Argyll “TAR” Robertson and Dudley Clarke. Robertson and Clarke engaged in an ambitious plan to fool the Nazis as to the date and whereabouts of the Allied invasion on D-Day. The deception included fake armies, phony radio signals, bogus military equipment, and extensive use of double agents.
The film has a surprisingly jam-packed ensemble starring as real-life heroes of the war. Cage plays flamboyant Serbian double agent Dusko Popov, considered one of Ian Fleming’s inspirations for James Bond. Jordi Mollà plays Spanish double agent Juan Pujol, Alice Eve is British intelligence agent Nancy Armstrong. Also in the cast are Sir Ben Kingsley, Lukas Haas, Adrian Topol, Emilio Sakraya, Maeve Courtier-Lilley, Art Malik, and Paul Anderson.
SYNOPSIS: FORTITUDE is based on an incredible true story and follows the fearless and unpredictable spy-soldiers Dudley Clarke (Ed Skrein) and Thomas Argyll “TAR” Robertson (Matthew Goode), as they devise the biggest deception mission ever mounted. With the support of Winston Churchill (Michael Sheen), Ian Fleming (Art Malik) and an extraordinary network of double agents, among them Dusko Popov (Nicolas Cage), the real-life spy who inspired the James Bond novels, Juan Pujol (Jordi Mollà), a Spanish chicken farmer, and Nancy Armstrong (Alice Eve), a top British Intelligence agent, they create a spectacular master plan using a fictitious army, fake tanks, aircraft and ships, actors and false radio messages to fool Hitler’s Nazi Army in the build-up to D-Day. Operation FORTITUDE decisively changed the course of World War II and paved the way for a free world.
While this movie looks like the best thing West has done in quite some time, there’s some interesting legal stuff going on behind the scenes. Afram, who is also a producer on the film, sued Netflix for $105M in June after an unencrypted copy of Fortitude was stolen from its office. He says this theft put sale of the film to potential buyers in jeopardy and also compromised any awards season strategies. I’m curious to see where that goes.
As such, Fortitude doesn’t have a distributor or a firm release date, but maybe this new trailer will change that. Too bad it’s not coming to TIFF.
