‘The East’ Confronts an Unwinnable War in Southeast Asia

The Netherlands had its own Vietnam experience in Indonesia in the years immediately after World War II. Dutch troops failed to put down local resistance fighters and eventually gave the former colony its independence in 1949.

“The East” is a Dutch movie that caused controversy in the Netherlands, because it tries to put the long-unexamined conflict under a moral microscope. If you’re thinking “Apocalypse Now” or “Platoon,” you’re not far off.

The movie opens in theaters and will be available on all digital VOD platforms on Aug. 12, 2021.

We’ve got a clip of a scene that happens in the middle of the movie. A group of inexperienced soldiers is sent on patrol, led by an incompetent commander who thinks he’s smarter than everyone else because he allegedly fought in the WWII resistance against the Nazis. He gets lost, and the unit ends up having to cross a river because the bridge shown on a map had been blown up months before. You can guess what happens.

The movie follows soldier Johan De Vries (played by Martijn Lakemeier) as he volunteers to fight in Indonesia and gets recruited into an elite unit by an enigmatic captain (Marwan Kenzari) known as “the Turk” to his men.

The Turk employs incredibly brutal tactics to put down the resistance, the kind that we all know only hardens the resolve of a rebel force and contributes to a negative outcome to the war.

The movie features both flashbacks and flash-forward scenes as it tells De Vries’ story. He goes back home with post-traumatic stress, and the movie uses his struggle in shocking ways. Director Jim Taihuttu is the great-grandson of an indigenous Moluccan who died fighting for the Dutch army during the conflict, and he wants to use the movie to shock his audience into thinking about the costs of his country’s colonial past.

“The East” reminds Americans that we are not the only nation continuing to deal with a complicated past. It’s a film that wants to shock Dutch audiences into thinking about their country’s history, and that makes it fascinating viewing for the rest of us.

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