Is The ‘Operation Finale’ Movie Based On A True Story?

Opening in theaters on Wednesday, MGM’s “Operation Finale” is a historical drama based on a true story. Oscar Isaac stars as Israeli agent Peter Malkin in the movie, which was directed by Chris Weitz, opposite Ben Kingsley, who plays “one of the chief architects of the Holocaust,” Adolf Eichmann, according to the studio.

The 2018 film tells the true story of a team of Israeli agents, which includes Malkin, as they travel to Argentina 15 years after World War II to find Eichmann. Their goal is to locate and capture him and bring him back to Israel to stand trial. The mission doesn’t go as planned and Malkin and Eichmann enter into a game of cat-and-mouse.

Screenwriter Matthew Orton wanted to take a look at Eichmann beyond the televised Eichmann Trials, which was a trial against Eichmann that had Holocaust survivors tell their stories, and beyond Hannah Arendt’s story of him in her New Yorker pieces and her book “Eichmann in Jerusalem: Report on the Banality of Evil.” He also wanted to learn more about the agents who set out on the mission to capture him and bring him to justice.

After doing a lot of research, Orton saw that there were differences in the accounts of what actually happened, but that there were enough consistencies to paint a vivid picture of it all. To tailor the story for the medium of film, he did have to switch a few things around, too. So, though based on real events, not everything shown in “Operation Finale” is exactly how it played out in reality.

“For the purpose of telling the story within the framework of a feature film and doing full justice to the peril faced by all the participants, Orton decided to collapse the timeline of certain events,” MGM’s production notes reveal. “The young girl, Sylvia Hermann (Haley Lu Richardson) who first located Eichmann through her relationship with his eldest son Klaus (Joe Alwyn), had first identified him two or three years before the mission took place; and the kidnapping of her father, Lothar Hermann (Peter Strauss) under the false pretext that he was actually Joseph Mengele in disguise, happened after Eichmann was extradited.”

See how the true story plays out in MGM’s new movie, “Operation Finale,” which is now playing in theaters.