ChicRawIdol A brilliant film that helped define a genre

DipitySkillful an ambitious but ultimately ineffective debut endeavor.

Mandeep Tyson The acting in this movie is really good.

Wyatt There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

Paul Hesp Paul Verhoeven and Rutger Hauer first joined forces when making 'Floris', a Dutch TV series for kids inspired by ITV's 'Ivanhoe', in the late 1960s. While not remotely as well made as its British forerunner - a recent documentary shows that it was very much learning by doing - the episodes you can now watch on YouTube are quite amusing, given the right age and nationality.'Soldaat van Oranje' (Soldier of Orange) is based on the eponymous memoirs of Erik Hazelhoff Roelfzema, who received the highest Dutch military decoration for his actions during WW II. The book is a ripping yarn, as promised by the title - Hauer, the lead in the film, has called it a 'boys' book'. The fact that it has been turned into a musical as well is another indication that it does not delve deeply into the grim history of the Netherlands during the war.The film does a fairly good job in touching on many aspects of the occupation of the Netherlands, such as the range of attitudes to the Nazi occupation that existed, from resistance via keeping your head down to joining the SS. The Englandspiel , a deadly 'game' played by the Germans with captured Dutch secret agents sent over by the British Special Operations Executive, inspires much of the story. And judging by what we know about her from newsreels, etc., the exiled Queen Wilhelmina (of Orange-Nassau, formally the soldiers' commander-in-chief) with her odd mannerisms is convincingly played by Andrea Domburg.However, those who are unfamiliar with Dutch history of these years will not get all the references; and as the tone of the whole film is Ivanhoe-ish, you wonder why so much effort was put into reconstructing reality. There are also scenes that take outright liberties with wartime reality for thrills, though they can be funny. My favourite is the mild bit of sexploitation in the scenes where a girl shows herself in full-length Eve's costume behind open windows in, respectively, Leiden and London (in both cases she stands on a bed placed, very conveniently, right under the window). There is a nice parallel: in Leiden a clearly amused Nazi collaborator looks up; in London the normally very puritanical Queen tries hard not be somewhat amused.The film's merits are in my opinion greater than that of Verhoeven's much later Black Book. But ripping yarns lose some of their appeal when you know something about the horrors of war (for that reason one of the book's real-life characters actually stayed away from the Hollywood-style gala opening performance of the film in Amsterdam).I keep wondering whether the starting point of the film could not also have been a starting point for a war film that digs deeper. The type of student fraternity initiation rite shown in the film was common until the 1960s, and this species of adolescent sadism has never gone away completely. Maybe because it does lead to bonding (as I know from experience); but you might be excused for seeing uncomfortable parallels between the pandemonium and the shaven heads of the new students and what happened in Nazi camps: an Amsterdam student fraternity actually had 'Dachautje spelen' ('playing little Dachau') on its initiation programme, during which people are known to have fainted. Later in the film Dutch WA-men (uniformed Nazis) dump a Jewish peddler's handcart in a canal. Is there no link between their playful sadism and 'Dachautje spelen'? Camps similar to Dachau were the peddler's destination. Why do people take things out on those who are weaker, where does the contempt for other human beings come from (which resulted in the murder of over 100,000 Dutch Jews)? But a film exploring those questions might not be a box office success.

movieguy81007 This is Paul Verhoeven's best Dutch film. Do not get me wrong I still like Turkish Delight, Katie Tippal, Spetters, and The Fourth Man. I like the music. This is truly an epic film. Rutger Hauer stars in this film and the other Dutch films directed by Paul Verhoeven he starred in are Turkish Delight, Katie Tippal, and Spetters. In Soldier of Orange first you see Rutger Hauer with a shaved head. Plus this movie is about of course soldiers. The first time I saw this movie I did not like it but then it grew on me. The first Dutch film by Paul Verhoeven I saw was Spetters. This movie is 10 times better than Spetters. Jerome Krabbe also stars in this film and the other Dutch films directed by Paul Verhoeven he starred in was Spetters and of course The 4th Man. The first time I saw Jerome Krabbe was in The Fugitive.

Kees de Vos (deVos) OK, i am sooo prejudiced being from Holland. And maybe that's the point. This movie is all about reinventing your prejudices. It tells the story how, at first sight, almost identical lives take different turns under intense circumstances, without it being really (in most cases) clear what drives one person one way and another the other way. This is not really a war story, but a story about evolving personalities. People become heroes or traitors almost by circumstance. The Second World War is merely a catalyst for this evolution.Please go see it (on DVD, out in sort notice) and prove me right or wrong. PS. one of the best music scores of all time from the late Rogier van Otterloo.

Roelio Successful war movies almost always depend on tone. We've seen so many battle films, so many soldiers and so many tanks, so many landings and invasions and spies dropped behind the lines that the actual subject matter itself is no longer enough for us. Movies like A BRIDGE TOO FAR may cost untold millions and be years in the making, but for the most part we're just not moved. Good war movies don't necessarily need a message, but they need a feeling: We want to sense what the war experience was like for a specific group of people at a particular time. Thi movie creates that feeling as effectively, probably, as it can be created. It traces the stories of six Dutch soldiers through the years before and during World War II, and at the movie's end we feel we know these people and have learned from their experiences. Although the film contains a great deal of suspense and a fair amount of violence, it's not a garish adventure movie, it's a human chronicle. And it involves us. That's all the more remarkable because this isn't a profoundly serious little film with a somber message, but a big, colorful, expensive war movie-the most costly production in Dutch film history. Expensive war movies tend to linger forever on their great special effects; they have a tendency to pose their heroes in front of collapsing buildings and expect us to be moved. SOLDIER OF ORANGE is big, but it's low-key. It's about how characters of ordinary human dimension might behave against the bewildering scale of a war. The movie's based on the memoirs of Erik Hazelhoff, a Dutch war hero who escaped from Nazi-occupied Europe, landed in England, was attached to the then hopelessly disorganized and ineffectual Dutch government in exile, and spent the war on a series of espionage missions before finally joining up with the Royal Air Force and flying many missions. What's interesting is that the Hazelhoff character is shown doing all of these things, and yet he doesn't emerge as a superhero; he's just a capable, brave man doing the next right thing. The film mostly follows Hazelhoff, but it begins in the pre-war years with six friends-college students, playing tennis, hanging out together, doubting war will really come-and it follows all six through the war. Four of them die, one in a particularly horrible way in a concentration camp. By following all six lives over a period of years, the film suggests the historical sweep of the war for many millions of lives; SOLDIER OF ORANGE isn't just episodes strung together (although it is episodic), but a suggestion of how long the war must have seemed, and how easily it must have seemed endless. The narrative structure is interesting. Instead of giving us a tightly knit plot, with characters assigned to particular roles and functions, it gives us a great many specific details. There are the scenes involving Queen Wilhelmina, for example. In exile in England, the dowager queen walks stiffly in her garden, gravely absorbs the advice of her ministers, receives delegations, and conveys a dignity upon the situation through her very bearing (for, of course, she had no real authority then at all). A subplot involving an underground Dutch radio operator is clothed in similar detail; we know enough of his character to know why he turns informer and his decision is not simply cowardly, but is almost understandable. Unforgivable, but understandable. The movie is filled with perceptions like that.