Blindness (2008) Movie Review

Based off the Nobel Prize winning novel by Jose Saramago, Blindness is a thriller about an epidemic that takes over the world and is unsettling film in nature and does not live up to what is established in its opening sequence. One would better be entertained watching Mad Max, 28 Days Later, or even I Am Legend as a futuristic world plagued by an epidemic.

The film has a lot of unspecifics, including the setting and the character’s names. At a traffic stop in a busy city a man (Yusuke Iseya) suddenly becomes blind and assisted home by a thief (Don McKellar, who also wrote the script for the film), who them stills his car and also becomes blind. After the blind man’s wife (Yoshino Kimura) takes him to see an eye doctor (Mark Ruffalo), who also goes blind. Nearly all entire population becomes blind by the spreading epidemic. The only person who has not gone blind is the doctor’s caring wife (Julianne Moore), who fakes being blind so that she can be taken to the government’s quarantine with her husband. There at the quarantine wards the man became blind in traffic, his wife, the thief, and others the audience is briefly introduced to like the woman in dark sun glasses (Alice Braga), the wise old man with the eye patch (Danny Glover), all become roommates in a ward with the doctor and his wife. The wife becomes the caretaker for all as hardly any answers are given as to what has happened or going on in the world. Madness ensues when a crazed ex-bartender (Gael Garcia Bernal) now blind king of a another ward gains power with a gun and seals up all of the food in exchange for everyone’s personal belongings, and then for sex from the women.

Blindness is as pretentious a film as they come, with no explanation and a journey that is overtly disturbing than emotional for the characters. It is surprising that the film is as terrible as it is, especially with the talent of Fernando Meirelles (City of God, The Constant Gardener) directing the film. The opening sequence works effectively, with Meirelles setting the tone of film quickly, which includes the camera becoming a bright milky obscure visual for the “white blindness” taking place. Meirelles uses this effect often throughout the film to assist in the frustration for the characters. However, the “white blindness” is never explained or even hinted at what it is or what caused it. The script also never hints at why the doctor’s wife is the only one that can still see. It is presumed she is like Robert Neville in I Am Legend, that she is somehow the only one immune to the epidemic. The journey is not told in balance, it is more told through the rapids, before the film goes over the waterfall and dies. This happens shortly after the doctor’s wife has an affair with another blind person and his wife just merely accepts what happens because of the current state. Once the film gets to the vicious rape scenes, which are mostly blurred by Meirelles, it gets viler. The reasoning behind the king and showing the breakdown in society is understood with this notions, but it is not as if the audience has too be beaten on the head with it. In researching the film, the book is supposed to be worse in these aspects. Lastly, the final sequence of the film is nearly laughably rather than satisfying. After a poor showing at Cannes last May, Meirelles took out a voice over narration by the Danny Glover character that supposedly hampered the film perhaps that would have given the film more explanation and merit.

The cast is composed of talented performers and none finer that Julianne Moore, who plays the doctor’s wife as if she has been taken through the emotional ringer. However, Moore has hardly any chemistry with Mark Ruffalo, who patiently plays her frustrated husband. Danny Glover fits the wise old man role well, and Alice Braga (who was in I Am Legend) is well cast as the woman that the doctor has an affair with. Gael Garcia Bernal takes on the chaotic role of the king, who is disgusting in his notions of order with all that are quarantined.

Blindness does strive to be a film about society and its downfall if something ever emerged to destroy it. The film is uneasy in terms of story and substance, which lays out a destructive and disturbing collapse of society and culture. The soundtrack for the film is also awful and the sound effects are so quick and loud that it just becomes another irritation. Besides the establishment of an effective opening, Blindness hinders into the land of pity and spite.