HPPUB MOVIE REVIEW of Dark Blue World

Title: Dark Blue World

Release Date: 2001

Nationality and Language: Czech Republic, Bohemian

Running time: about 114 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Distributor and Production Company: Sony Pictures Classics

Director; Writer: Jan Sverak

Producer:

Cast: Ondrej Vetchy, Krystof Hadek, Tara Fitzgerald and Charles Dance.

Technical: Panavision 2.35/1, Digital

Relevance to HPPUB site:

Review: This mini-epic based on World War II has a general plot similar to “Pearl Harbor.” Two fighter pilots (Lt. Franka, and Karel) escape Czechoslovakia after Hitler invades and join the British RAF before the Battle of Britain. The younger man (Karel) gets shot done and finds succor in a farm house, where he will eventually develop a relationship with the owner, Susan Whitmore. Later the Lieutenant will expand all of this into a triangle. But after the war is over, Franka winds up in a Communist prison, facing hard labor as an “educated man.” A much more pointed foreign film about World War II was the Finnish epic “Ambush” (1999). This film, compared to both “Ambush” and “Pearl Harbor,” as well to the epic “Sunshine” seems a bit amorphous and bland with less sharply drawn characters. But the photography, often of the English coast, is spectacular, and sometimes a monochromatic blue.

Related reviews: Pearl Harbor, Ambush

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