Originally posted by rosco
I dont know...
I thought Dark Blue World was just PH with subtitles.
A little bit, but as Yippee said, the flying sequences were a nice antidote to PH. The sound, for example, is pretty good (for example, when the 109s are firing you can hear the rattle of the mgs and the jackhammer thump of the 20mm, a detail that's often overlooked--listen to the Zekes firing in PH, e.g.). The film is also pretty realistic about the amount of damage you could inflict with a bunch of 303s. It takes two planes, for example, to damage a bomber enough so that the crew decides to bail. Things get a little sloppy in the middle part of the film (with Spit 1s escorting late model B25s), but overall the aerial sequences are refreshingly free of the theatrics of PH (although they CGI people got a little carried away with the idea of ejected shell-casings).
And my favorite bit was where the one pilot rescues the other by fitting the two of them into the cockpit. It's actually almost like a parody of that infamous, puke-inducing, "sunset flight" sequence in PH.
And it's better than PH simply for the fact that it's about a group (Czech RAF pilots) that don't get talked about a lot in the mainstream; and the film isn't trying to whip the public into a jerk-off patriotic frenzy, but just to show the tragedy of what happened to these brave men when they returned home to a place that freedom had deserted. It died at the box office in the US simply because it's a sub-titled film and required people to actually read.
