The jokey headlines write themselves: “A Little More Light, Please,” “Stumbling in the Darkness,” and “All the Bad Television We Cannot Unsee.” I will refrain, with regret, from adding to the list and state merely that Netflix’s adaptation of Anthony Doerr’s 2014 novel is a clumsy squandering of serious promise. One more, you say? Oh, all right: “All the Potential We Cannot Realize.”

Like its Pulitzer-winning source material, All the Light We Cannot See is set in wartime France, in the port city of Saint-Malo. There, on the top floor of an otherwise abandoned house, Parisian refugee Marie-Laure LeBlanc (Aria Mia Loberti) reads Jules Verne into a shortwave radio while awaiting the return of her missing father and uncle. Because the 16-year-old has been blind since childhood, her days are necessarily circumscribed: Nazis prowl the streets, and American bombs have begun to fall. Yet Marie’s transmissions are about more than simply passing the time. Read in a particular order, Verne’s pages provide aid to the French Resistance. “You are sending messages in code,” one character tells Marie, “that will help to win the war.”