Hot on the heels of Netflix’ beefy boy adventure Triple Frontier, Ben Affleck is teaming with TV’s manliest man writer, True Detective’s Nic Pizzolatto, for Ghost Army, a World War II drama based on Rick Beyer and Elizabeth Sayles’ 2015 book, The Ghost Army of World War II.
Per The Hollywood Reporter, Ghost Army brings a Patch Adams-esque twist to the war movie, with a squadron’s playfulness and creativity serving to save lives in non-traditional ways. Using “smoke-and-mirrors,” these soldiers used “blow-up tanks, fake radio transmissions and noise machines to deceive the German forces, making them believe that, among other things, armies were in certain positions where, in actuality, no armies were even close.” In addition to saving numerous lives, they pissed off tons of Nazis, which is also good.
The project marks Affleck’s first directorial effort since 2015's Live By Night, which followed his Oscar-winning Argo. Pizzolatto is credited with the latest version of the script, having spewed his brand of smoke across a version by Shazam!’s Henry Gayden that, we assume, needed more tortured male bonds and institutional corruption.