Dark Blue World on DVD

Dark Blue World is a fascinating and entertaining look at the tragic story of Czech pilots who fought for the freedom of their country, only to find themselves in work camps as the Communist government punished them out of its fear of them.

Franta Slama, through whose eyes the story is told, is a pilot mentoring youngster Karel Vojtisek. But then the Nazis invade and they decide to flee their homeland to enlist in the RAF and fight the Nazis. Their lack of English is a barrier to their success, but eventually they're fluent enough to go up in their Spitfires and interact with "native born" pilots and ground personnel - and go after German planes.

There's plenty of great flying, mostly in Spitfires - and that's just fine with us. The old fighters look and sound great in this beautifully shot widescreen film.

Unfortunately, there's also the obligatory love triangle and we could have done without this. And despite the disclaimer/warning of sexual content at the beginning of the disc, it's pretty mild.

Franta and Karel's friendship builds as they cope with being strangers in a strange land, but is threatened later and in the end their relationship turns out to be a lot more complicated than one might expect from a movie. The actors, Ondrej Vetchy and Krystof Hadek, respectively, are very believable and probably had a lot of fun pretending to fly those venerable old warhorses.

And those warhorses look and sound great. It appears that the filmmakers used real and replica Spitfires along with a healthy dose of computer-generated effects. Most of the shots are terrific, though once or twice they stick in an obvious computer job and for a split second your suspension of disbelief vanishes. It comes back quickly, though!

And they appear to have gotten the sound of the old Spits' Merlin engines right, too - and hearing them fly around in Dolby Digital 5.1 is a wonderful experience.

Forget the romance, this is a great plane movie, a great pilot movie. We see how these guys lived and bonded, and coped with some of their buddies never coming back from a mission. This is one of the best World War II flying movies ever; well written, acted and directed, with excellent production values and well transferred to DVD.

The Special Edition DVD features digitally mastered (in high definition) anamorphic widescreen (16x9 TV compatible) video and the picture is lush and gorgeous. There are a lot of browns, blues and, especially greens in this movie, and they look terrific. The picture is also razor sharp.

The audio is a combination of Czech and English and the sound quality is excellent - as mentioned, we especially loved the sounds of the aircraft zipping around the room.

Subtitles do a good job of helping you understand what's going on.

Extras include a running commentary from the director and producer (in English), and some neat stuff on the making of the film and its extensive special effects - a documentary and a series of examples of special effects creation.

A wonderful extra is "Aerial Symphony," which is just a bunch of airplane shots set to music (and what more could one ask for?). It's great, but far too short.

There's also a photo montage and a Weblink to the official "Dark Blue World" site!

Dark Blue World, from Columbia Tristar Home Video
115 min. anamorphic widescreen (2.35:1), 16x9 TV compatible, Dolby Digital 5.1 surround
Starring Ondrej Vetchý, Krystof Hádek, Tara Fitzgerald, Charles Dance,
Produced by Eric Abraham, Jan Sverák,
Written by Zdenek Sverák, Directed by Jan Sverák.

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