Mixed feelings about his movie, whether you enjoy it depends on your background as it is filled with historic, cultural and military inaccuracies that should have been spotted during production. For a movie claiming to be inspired by real events surrounding the individual Marco Kroon it is a loss that they were not able to accurately represent the recent historic environment which has been extensively documented.
Dutch movies are generally notoriously poorly produced, but there are worse productions than De Vuurlinie.
I must caveat that I am a veteran of ISAF and served in Tarin Kowt and Chora (at the White Compound), and the Baluchi valley around the period presented in the video. I admit that the movie was not made for me, but the faults in the movie are just too extensive to ignore.
For a movie claiming to be about Afghanistan they made some colossal blunders. The bad guys sport the ISIS flag which is absurd as the movie war bits take place in 2006 and IS did not yet have their flag in prominent use yet and IS had no presence in Afghanistan. IS are also the ideological opposites to the Taliban (different Islamic religious streams and the Taliban are hardliners for self-preservation of Afghanistan whereas IS wants world expansion). This goes to the extremes that these groups have been fighting each other (currently in the Korengal valley between the Taliban and the ISK)
Anyone with a superficial interest in regional culture or history can pick out that the Taliban and IS are very different groups. It is insane that the movie went this far into production with a colossal failure like this going unnoticed.
Now onto the production, please take a seat.
There is a lot of high quality historic special forces footage from Dutch patrols in the Uruzgan region which could have been used as reference. The locations in this movie however are mostly brick housing which the region did not have. Additionally, the White Compound in Chora is visualised as being a hangar (the system ceiling made me chuckle) meaning limited effort went into localization as well as these environments are also well documented.
Weaponry was poorly portrayed. 'Marco' carries an ill fitting SERPA pistol holster that is aimed upward and because it does not fit the Glock the trigger is exposed. This is a great way to shoot your buddy in the face, no Commando would ever walk around like this with gun barrels aiming upward and triggers exposed, it is just plain dumb and would be identified by anyone with any military experience.
It looks like the prop master had limited options for weaponry as well, the main machine gun being fired is an MG3 which is a German machine gun that the Netherlands does not use. This is sad because plenty of UK prop shops have area and period correct props such as the FNM240 (we call it the FN MAG) available for rent that could have resolved this. But this is just another example that any degree of (historic) accuracy was not a consideration.
The uniforms look okayish but are incomplete, lacking important details like badges, tactical gear. You also never see a backpack so I guess they are living out of their pockets. It looks like they just gathered what they had. It seems the costume department had a big bag of airsoft accessories as a lot of the portrayed weapons are obviously airsoft replicas and the Taliban can be seen running around in airsoft tactical vests without any attachments to them (did anyone in the production crew ever take a look at a picture of the Taliban?)
The tactics are a laugh as well, walking around with the Night vision monocular looking into street lights. No overwatch positions being taken but just sneaking in on foot into a not previously reconned village. It makes the tactics and fighting look more like a poor episode of the A team than a real war movie. This is sad because the reason Marco was decorated was because of his methodical approach in planning his operations and not having lost a single operator under his command. The movie does not portray this at all, the briefings are laughably short with zero regard to eventualities.
The music is a blatant ripoff from recognizable bits from Hans Zimmer with the ending song being an poor copy of the BlackHawkDown theme song, including the singing. This is hilariously bad, they should have just bought the rights to Zimmer's work instead of this insane copying (which is likely legally questionable as well). Zero points here as well.
Is it really this bad? As I said I don't think I am the intended audience and from a military, cultural and historic perspective it is apparent that very little effort went into making this about TaskForce Viper/66 or Afghanistan. I doubt they had any experts on hand, and neither did they care about experts leading to so many mistakes in every scene portraying Afghanistan. It is obvious they simply did not care to portray Afghanistan, the Taliban or TaskForce Viper in a realistic way.
For the overall story line, this is amusing and better than most Dutch movies (which are generally of a very poor quality and I'd rarely give something a 6 out of 10). I think it will appease to most Dutch viewers as long as they didn't have high expectations or previous knowledge about the ISAF mission of Afghanistan. If you instead want to learn about what it was like in ISAF/OEF there are way better movies out there.
Another saving grace is Pierre Bokma's performance as General van Uhm, this was spot on regarding acting and personality, he had limited scenes but they were the strongest acting in the movie.
If they had spent a little bit more effort in portraying the reason why Marco Kroon was decorated, and using archive footage of Afghanistan as reference this could have many much, much better.
