Fortitude trailer: Nicolas Cage plays the man who accidentally invented James Bond (trailer).

Every so often a film turns up that is neither science fiction nor fantasy, and yet lands squarely in the SFcrowsnest in-tray on the grounds that without it we would have no volcano lairs, no laser wristwatches and no orbital death platforms operated by men who stroke cats. The Fortitude trailer is one of those. It stars Nicolas Cage as the man who helped invent James Bond by the straightforward method of existing.

Cage plays Duško Popov, the Serbian double agent who ran under the codename Tricycle, gambled enthusiastically, spent money that was not his with tremendous style, and was watched at a Portuguese baccarat table by a certain naval intelligence officer named Ian Fleming. Fleming went home and wrote a character with an oddly similar approach to expense claims. Popov, in other words, is the closest thing espionage has to a primary source, and casting Nicolas Cage as him is the sort of decision that either wins awards or produces something magnificent by accident. Frequently both.

The trailer wears its Bond connection with no shame whatsoever, which is entirely the correct approach. Cage orders a martini with the famous stirring instruction. A hotel room door loses the bottom half of its 8 and becomes room 007. Somewhere a subtlety consultant is quietly updating their CV. Honestly, though, a film about an operation that involved inflatable rubber tanks has no business being subtle about anything.

That operation is the real draw. Fortitude was the deception campaign that convinced German high command the Allied invasion was coming at the Pas-de-Calais rather than Normandy, and then kept them believing it for weeks after the landings had already happened. It ran on a fictitious formation called the First United States Army Group, which existed almost entirely as radio traffic, plywood landing craft, canvas aircraft and General Patton standing about in Kent looking cross for the benefit of enemy reconnaissance. The Allies won a good deal of the Second World War with what was essentially an extremely expensive amateur dramatics society.

Ed Skrein plays Dudley Clarke and Matthew Goode plays Thomas Argyll “TAR” Robertson, the two officers at the centre of it. History is kind to this casting. Clarke effectively invented modern military deception in Cairo and was once arrested in Madrid wearing women’s clothing, an episode MI5 filed under the general heading of best not discussed. Robertson ran the double agents and was known throughout the service as Passion Pants, on account of his tartan trousers. Whatever else Fortitude gets wrong, it cannot make these people less peculiar than they actually were.

Jordi Mollà appears as Juan Pujol, a Spanish chicken farmer who volunteered to spy for Britain, was politely declined, and therefore went freelance as a fake German agent, inventing an entire network of twenty-seven imaginary sub-agents from a room in Lisbon using a tourist guide, a railway timetable and a magazine about the Royal Navy. He was so convincing that the Germans funded his non-existent staff, and he finished the war decorated by both sides. Submit that as fiction and your editor sends it back with a note about credibility.

Around them, Michael Sheen turns up as Winston Churchill, Art Malik plays Ian Fleming, Alice Eve is intelligence officer Nancy Armstrong, and Sir Ben Kingsley, Paul Anderson and Lukas Haas fill out an ensemble that suggests casting simply rang everybody. Simon West directs, which is worth knowing in advance. The man made Con Air and Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, so anyone expecting a hushed, tasteful meditation on wartime intelligence work should probably recalibrate. This will have velocity.

Then there is the small matter of the film’s own security. In June, an unencrypted master copy of Fortitude was reportedly stolen on a hard drive from Netflix’s Los Angeles office, and in July writer-producer Simon Afram sued the company for a reported 105 million dollars. Netflix disputes it. We note, purely as a matter of historical symmetry, that a film about the most successful deception operation ever mounted has managed to lose track of itself. If the drive eventually surfaces in a lock-up somewhere near Calais, the whole thing will have achieved a kind of perfection that no marketing department could have planned.

Here at SFcrowsnest we have a soft spot for spy-fi, and this sits at the genre’s origin point. Every gadget-strewn absurdity of the last seventy years traces back to a real war fought partly with rubber tanks, invented armies and a chicken farmer with a vivid imagination. Bond was never as far-fetched as people think. He was merely tidier, better dressed and considerably less likely to be arrested in Madrid in a frock.

Fortitude runs to 103 minutes and does not yet have an announced release date. The trailer is above. Watch it and reflect that the most successful weapon of the war was, essentially, a very good lie told extremely patiently.