Movie Review: Operation Mincemeat

At some point, I lost track of most of the new movies coming out. I think it’s because I knew I wasn’t going to see them in the theater, so why not just wait until they made it to one of my streaming platforms? The disadvantage to this is that I have no idea what many of the new movies are about. Many just didn’t make it onto my radar at all. The good news is that I can find movies I haven’t heard of at all, and then be pleasantly surprised.

Operation Mincemeat came out last year. It stars Colin Firth in a story based on a real life incident in World War II. The Allies needed to invade Italy, and the only logical place to do it was in Sardinia. Hitler knew this, so Sardinia was well defended. What the Allies needed to do, then, is to convince Hitler that they were actually going to invade somewhere else, so that he’d move his defenses there, instead. To convince him of this, they came up with an idea of having a body wash ashore carrying top secret documents that detailed the Greece invasion. But it’s one thing to have an idea. Making it work is entirely different.

I really enjoyed the movie. It had solid acting, and it was a real pleasure watching as these different characters worked through scenarios to try and guess what the Nazis would do in response to their actions. (If we do X, they’ll do Y, but they might anticipate us doing X, so we should do Z, etc.) Yes, we all know that ultimately Hitler lost the war, but that doesn’t take away from the tension of this singular incident. Everyone who watched it with me had a great time.

As a quick aside, I wanted to speak up in favor of good, but not great, movies and media. It’s something I have to remind myself from time to time. I’ll look through reviews, searching for something that’s highly rated. This one is a 6.6 on IMDB, and I debated watching it. The thing is, at that number, it could be a 5 or a 6 for me, in which case I’d rather just avoid it, or it could be a 7 or an 8, in which case I’d have a good time watching it.

Also, if I watch too many of the same kind of movie, it just gets . . . boring. I’ll call in the Pixar Problem. Pixar generally makes really good movies. Fantastic movies. They’re excellent produced, heartwarming, funny, and worth watching. But I’m getting to the point that I just don’t really care about Pixar movies coming out. It almost feels formulaic to me by now. I don’t know how they move past that. It’s not the CGI; it’s the way their stories are constructed.

Yes, I get it. I’m complaining that a movie studio is making movies that are too good. But if they make enough of them, close together, then they all sort of drown each other out. Marvel is playing very near that territory now. When you feel like you’ve seen the movie before you even watch the movie, you lose the desire to watch it at all.

In any case, back to Operation Mincemeat. It’s on Netflix right now. 8/10. Check it out.

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