Michael Bay Developing WWII Action Thriller SABOTAGE
Michael Bay is going to take another shot at directing a World War II film. For those of you who forgot, Bay previously directed Pearl Harbor, which looked cool, but could have been awesome had he built a great story around it. Maybe he will redeem himself with his this new project, called Sabotage.
The movie is set up at Paramount Picture, and it's an action thriller about the Norwegian heavy water sabotage during World War II. It will be based on Neal Bascomb's upcoming nonfiction book, Sabotage: A Genius Scientist, His Band of Young Commandos, and the Mission to to Kill Hitler's Super Bomb. Here's the description of the story, thanks to The Wrap,
Set in 1942, the story follows a brilliant scientist who flees the Gestapo to inform the Allies that the Nazis are secretly developing a nuclear program at an industrial fortress called Vermork deep in the mountainous expanse of Norway’s Telemark region. Knowing that Hitler gaining nuclear capabilities would be unthinkably catastrophic, the Allies assemble a fearless team of nine Norwegian refugee commandos to infiltrate the Nazi-occupied country. In an apparent suicide mission, this team must brave the arctic landscape and pull off an impossibly daring assault on Vermork, which sits perched on impenetrable, icy cliffs. With little more than parachutes, skis, tommy guns, and explosives, the team is the Allies’ only hope to halt Hitler’s nuclear ambitions, and their adventure is one of WWII most thrilling, action-packed tales.
This sounds like it could be an awesome movie, and I think this is something that Bay could do some really cool stuff with visually. Hopefully he can lock down a great script.
The story has already been adapted twice. The first version was a 1948 Norwegian production called The Fight Over the Heavy Water, which was a quasi-documentary that features several of the actual members of Operations Grouse and Freshman. The second film was called The Heroes of Telemark, which was released in 1965, and it starred Kirk Douglas.