The mighty ducks part 1 Of

The mighty ducks part 1

Of course, who am I, short of being Michelangelo and I am far short of being Michelangelo to believe I still see outlines of the work of art in the original block of marble that the the mighty ducks part 1 completely missed? The problem is, for whatever reason, that most filmmakers seem to me to be producing less a finished sculpture of David than something like those famous unfinished Prisoners of Michelangelo that remind one of poor Han Solo trapped in carbonite. Then again, I sometimes also pick out patterns in the tiles on our bathroom floor that I think would make really cool pictures. So all this may have mostly, then, to do with the admittedly-botched artist who seems to be permanently trapped inside of me. Be that as it may, the film that most recently got me musing in this way again was just released on DVD, Dark Blue World, a Czech film, for which I had high hopes and would have seen at the theaters except for an unsettling number of bad reviews. By the same father-son team that gave us the truly enjoyable Kolya and My Sweet Little Village, the film is about Czech pilots who flew for the RAF during World War II, after their own county had been gobbled up in Hitlers quest for lebensraum. This most expensive production in Czech film industry history is not nearly as good as that other recent and more cheaply-made Czech movie about coming to terms with the messy consequences and moral conundrums of World War and Cold War, 2000s Divided We Fall. Usually, Id just review the film I liked and ignore the one I didnt, except here, as so often, Im haunted by the film that might have been. Dark Blue World is a great-looking film, with some fine moments in dogfight sequences pitting Messerschmidts and Spitfires over the English countryside. The pyrotechnics are not so much that they pull focus from the relationships in the story, which would be fine, except it was the relationships that left me cold. I felt even worse as I listened to the director and his screenwriter father talking on the DVD Special Features about the kind of movie they thought they were making: a film about friendship, set against a love triangle, amid war. Hey, this is a fine idea and its been done both well and badly; its one of those things that if you get it right is archetypal, and cliche-ridden if you get it wrong. For me, neither the friendship nor romance ever rose here above the level of cliche: the chemistry just was not there for either Eros or Philia. More importantly, there didnt seem to be a moral center to anchor either end of the triangle, as was the case with the oddball love triangle quadrangle? in Divided We Fall, which was all about moral center. In Dark Blue World, one guy sleeps with the girl, the other guy sleeps with the girl, their friendship sketchy at best goes bad, sketchily, then the first guy inevitably sacrifices himself for the other: but in such a way as to remain as vague and anti-climatic as everything else. Meanwhile, the action occasionally flashes forward to the Communist prison where all these Czech pilots ended up after the mighty ducks part 1 war, where the friendship theme is still nominally in play, former enemies learning to love each other under harsh conditions, blah blah blah. I was unconvinced and thought the flashbacks were both ineffective and unnecessarily took screen time away from the main story. If the point was that these flyers did not get a heros welcome after the mighty ducks part 1 war but, in fact, the opposite, than this tragic irony did not seem to me emphasized well enough, and certainly not in the most obvious way: by contrasting it with the homecoming of their fellow RAF pilots back on the other side of the Iron Curtain in England. Indeed, we didnt see much of those British pilots at all, as the story segregated the Czechs and contained the love triangle action between two Czech friends. And heres where I think the mistake was made, so let me make my case. With a love triangle involving friends, the obvious point of moral attack has to do with BETRAYAL. Fine, this story shows one friend feeling terribly betrayed, and the other feeling terribly guilty about it all. But theres a bigger picture here, which I felt terribly betrayed when it was ignored. The bigger picture has to do with the absurd historical irony that Czech pilots would be fighting in England on the side of England at all, considering that bigger picture. If you want to talk about BETRAYAL in this context, dont you think youd better foreground the shameful betrayal of Czechoslovakia by the British, when Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain tried to appease Hitler by abandoning the smaller nation to him in hopes of achieving for England at least Peace in our time? Yet in Dark Blue World, a film featuring members of the Czech air force who escaped from the Nazis invading their homeland and across Europe to come to England to risk their lives in the cause of the nation that betrayed them, passes over this dicey bit of backstory so quickly that if you didnt already know about it, it will pass right over your head into the pretty blue yonder. The betrayal of Czechoslovakia by the British is the hundred pound gorilla this film, made in Britain, all but ignores. Maybe the filmmakers didnt want to bite the hand that provided the location and all the rare, museum piece airplanes used for those cool dogfights. Obviously, were not on the same ethical scale as trading Sudetenland for peace, but at some level you have to wonder what exactly the deal was here. Alright, time to cut to the chase. I claimed to have seen something in the material that the artists missed, that is, the story that was crying out at least to me to be sculpted from this material, so Id better shut up and put up, Heres How They Should Have Done It: Instead of making both pilots Czech, the friendship should have been between a Czech pilot and an English pilot. That would have shored up the problem of contrast between their two fates in the postwar period, with the British flyer getting the girl and a heros welcome. More importantly, in this way, all the incipient bad feelings and moral judgment connected with the English betrayal of Czechoslovakia could be channeled onto the English pilot when he steals away the poor, homeless Czech pilots girl. The architypal or cliche-ridden way bring such a set up to satisfactory conclusion is to have the Czech forgive the English pilot, and to do so in the ultimate way, by laying down his life for him, even though he doesnt deserve it.