Under most circumstances, you’d imagine any movie that secured a perfect 100 percent Rotten Tomatoes score and topped Netflix’s global viewership charts would be held in the highest of esteem, but it already feels as though The Forgotten Battle has been living up to its title by fading from relevance in short order.
It’s been almost exactly one year since Matthijs van Heijningen Jr.’s World War II epic landed on the world’s most heavily-subscribed streaming service, where it performed remarkably well for a hot minute as a Dutch feature lacking in any notable star power other than Harry Potter alum Tom Felton, although it disappeared just as quickly as it arrived to conquer the platform’s rankings.
Set during the Battle of the Scheldt, the narrative isn’t too dissimilar to that of Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk, in that the story intersects between three different viewpoints with a Nazi solider, British pilot, and local resistance fighter threading the disparate threads together into a powerful and hard-hitting whole.
One of the most expensive productions to ever come out of the Netherlands, The Forgotten Battle‘s rave reviews and brief impact on Netflix haven’t been enough to see it linger in the consciousness, but there are at least a hardy band of supporters attempting to drum up a renewed wave of support on Reddit.
So many average-to-terrible titles hit Netflix on such a regular basis that customers have become numb to the mediocrity, but it’s a minor tragedy that an under-the-radar gem like The Forgotten Battle faded away in an instant without so much as a second thought.
