F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote a piece on How to Waste Material, claiming essentially that there are only so many good ideas or so much artistic raw material available, and when bad or lazy artists use it up for bad or incomplete works, it's not like somebody else can come along later and use it again; the idea is, for all intents and purposes, permanently botched.

Going to the movies these days is much too often, at best, a painful exercise in sifting through a growing pile of wasted material and botched ideas. Of course, since the pile of botched ideas is dwarfed only by the pile of money that even bad films generate, it's not likely that any Idea Protection Agency will ever be able to put a stop to this ongoing waste of our international resources. Whole forests of ideas are clear cut and not replaced; at least new ideas grow faster than trees, if that's any consolation for all the terrible waste.

Meanwhile, the only way I have been able to connect with many films — talk about them, think about them, engage with them — is to muse over where they went wrong and consider what might have been done to prevent what is otherwise a movie not worth talking or thinking about or in any way engaging with. Kind of a mental thumb twiddling I give into at the theater when I find myself in the midst of a botched film. This drives my wife crazy, and if you think it might do the same for you, read no further, for I intend to spoil the film I discuss here in many more ways than one.

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 artist 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 Hitler's 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, 2000's Divided We Fall. Usually, I'd just review the film I liked and ignore the one I didn't, except here, as so often, I'm 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 it's been done both well and badly; it's 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 didn't 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 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 hero's welcome after the 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 didn't 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 here's 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 there's 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, don't you think you'd 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 didn't 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 didn't want to bite the hand that provided the location and all the rare, museum piece airplanes used for those cool dogfights. Obviously, we're 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 I'd better shut up and put up, i.e. Here's 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 hero's 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 pilot's 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 doesn't deserve it. Then we cut to a supporting character who goes home to prison instead of a hero's welcome, skipping all the ineffective flashbacks and covering all the bases which should have been covered anyway. I'm not sure this entirely dispenses with another problem of the film, which had to do with a second betrayal, that of the Czech people by their own government and citizens under Communism, which when all was said and done, wasn't much different than if they'd have stayed part of the German Reich — but let's let that one go.

As it is, I'm embarrassed to be spending a film review essentially betraying the filmmakers by reviewing the film I wished they'd made instead of the one they did. On the other hand, I probably wouldn't have written a word about this film if I didn't have the chance to use it as a springboard for further musing on the possibilities latent in the material. Perhaps that was a bad idea.

Or, perhaps talking about the film that might-have-been was actually a good idea, only I've missed something obvious, and botched it once again. In which case, I would quickly make the case, contra Fitzgerald, that botched ideas play an important role in scouting out all the artistic dead ends that later artists are thus able to avoid, minesweeping as it were. Meanwhile, I have one last embarrassing confession to make: I just went back and looked up that essay by Scott Fitzgerald and discovered that it wasn't exactly focused the way I said and thought it was and have made use of it here. In other words, the idea of an essay on botching good ideas was latent in his material, even if Fitzgerald didn't precisely see it. What Fitzgerald should have written was... oh, forget it.