Sir Ranulph Fiennes, an English adventurer, polar explorer and former S.A.S. man is the author of The Feather Men, the novel on which this film is adapted. Although he has often claimed the novel was a true story, the families of the real dead S.A.S. men named in the novel who died on S.A.S. exercises, and the S.A.S. themselves publicly attacked it as sick exploitation and complete fiction. The S.A.S. even went on the record to disown both Fiennes and the book, with Lieutenant Colonel Ian Smith telling the Daily Mail "It was utter bulls-it, the figment of a fertile imagination. What was really upsetting, was that it was making a story out of a tragedy." Maggie Denaro, the widow of one of the dead S.A.S. men said of Fiennes, "It's time he grew up. He's made his money out of the book. He should come clean. When the book came out saying Mike had been murdered, we knew it wasn't true. But that didn't stop our children from being upset when other people believed it." Although Fiennes claims he sent a manuscript of the book to the S.A.S. and the families of the dead men, who gave their approval, they have all unequivocally denied his claim.
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The world is in chaos. The economic crisis continues as an oil crises looms. War rages everywhere. It is a time of revolution, assassination and covert operations.
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It is 1980.
In the final sequence, Spike is escaping in a second generation Volkswagen Jetta, a car that did not existed until 1985.
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