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peter-kistemaker
Reviews
The Zone of Interest (2023)
Boring
What have I just been watching? For me it was the most annoying, long-winded film ever on a subject where many other films, such as Schindler's List, The Pianist, The Gray Zone, managed to touch me to the depths of my soul.
Okay, I understand that this film wanted to show you that the Hoss family lived a 'normal' life just outside one of the largest extermination camps ever; Auswitch.
It is all clear to me that this is astonishing, incomprehensible, shocking, but you are not going to make a 100-minute film out of that, are you?
What does it offer the viewer?
You see people living a 'normal' life. They go on picnics, to school, play games, eat, drink, while daddy Hoss gallops to 'work' every day on his horse in good spirits to gas a few thousand people again and then burn their bodies in a crematorium.
Yes, it is the pinnacle of the flattening of human emotions, but by filming that, the film becomes incredibly banal.
And that banality made the story lose all its power for me. You were, as it were, watching the life of the 'Avarage' family with the burning ovens of Auswitch in the background, but the impact it was supposed to make, like those other films mentioned above did and could, was therefore, for me, completely lost. In the end I almost fell asleep because I couldn't care less about what the Hoss family was doing there and I fast-forwarded through the last half hour just to get it over with.
Krigsseileren (2022)
Not captivating
I heard about the outstanding reviews and emotionally captivating scenes, so I thought I HAVE to see this myself. I watched all 3 episodes. With difficulty, I must say. I didn't get any connection with the main characters and the reason for that was that the lead-up to dramatic development was never shown. For example: The boat they were on, sunk, but you never see the attack of a U-boat. And that goes on throughout the series. Only the aftermath of things, never they show you the prelude to it. And by doing this it never 'sucks you in' the emotion that would go with a COMPLETE scene. The scenes jump from year to year and show you just a brief moment of what happened in that specific year with the crew at sea and the family that stayed at home. The actors did their job well, but it was the script that skipped every prelude to the drama that followed and that was a missed change in my opinion. Therefore I watched the whole 3 hours without any emotions popping up whatsoever. The series starts in 1939 and ends in 1972 and it felt like I had to crawl through all those years. The series also fizzled out at the end and I thought: pfff, finally it's over. A meager six on my part.
De slag om de Schelde (2020)
Boring
The start is quite nice. Young lad throws a stone through the windshield of a German truck and is immediately chased by those Germans as being part of the resistance.
After a short introduction we suddenly find ourselves in Narva, on the Russian front.
Here we find a Dutch volunteer and one of the main characters who is being attacked by a Russian T34. Note: In mirror image!!
In the T34 the driver is on the right side of the hull and the machine gunner is on the left side.
In the film, a T34 rolls up in mirror image, driver on the left, machine gun on the right.
These are those annoying mistakes that you can avoid during editing.
Pro: The Germans speak German, the Dutch speak Dutch and the English speak English.
Fortunately, that has now become standard and we are no longer confronted with Germans speaking fluently English in a (war) movie.
Then something else, the story follows a Dutchman in the German Wehrmacht (Heer)? That is not possible.
The Wehrmacht was the official German army and only men with German nationality could be enlisted there.
Hitler could not, constitutionally speaking, recruit non-Germans into the Wehrmacht.
He had the (Waffen) SS for that. Foreigners were all conscripted into the Waffen SS, a paramilitary army consisting largely of foreign volunteers, such as the Foreign Legion in France
So if that Dutchman had served with the Germans, he would have been in the Waffen SS, just like 25,000 of his compatriots.
The script was like loose sand to me.
I didn't have any connection with the main characters.
The Battle itself lasts about 15 minutes and was very amateurish in my opinion.
Something like 300 allies who come storming towards the enemy as one big clod, without the support of tanks or proper artillery back-up.
Those are tactics from 200 years ago, but they don't fit in with modern warfare.
Spreading out is the motto nowadays, by doing so you create lesser targets.
I found the whole movie mostly boring.
So this film disappears, just like Dunkirk, in my digital garbage bin.
Blackbook (Zwartboek) another Dutch war movie still tops the ranks for me.
This one doesn't even come close.