Written by: Don McKellar (screenplay), Jose Saragamo (novel)
Directed by: Fernando Meirelles
There’s random guy (Yusuke Iseya) who discovers he suddenly has become blind while waiting at a stop light. A thief (Don McKellar) takes him home and steals his car. Blind guy’s wife (Yoshino Kimura) comes home and sees he has made a mess and takes him to the doctor’s office. The doctor (Mark Ruffalo) examines him and sees no real cause for his blindness, yet is baffled because Blind Guy describes everything as white, where normal blindess is simply an absence of light, not an abundance. Doctor goes home and tells his wife (Julianne Moore) off the bizarre case. They go to bed and the next morning Doctor finds himself seeing the same white abundance of light. Such is the case for every person that was in the doctor’s office that day plus everyone that they came in contact with and so on and so forth.
Within hours government vehicles have come to take Doctor and the immediately effected into quarantine camps. His wife, who miraculously can still see, decides to go with him since she doesn’t really know where her husband is going. They soon find themselves surrounded with the people who were in the doctor’s office the day before. Freaky outtie. Anyway, over the course of the week the camp soonn is busting at the seams with those infected. The majority of the movie is about the groups survival in the camp and eventually their “freedom” into a country gone blind.
Good lord this movie was hard to watch. I don’t just call these people by their character traits simply because I forgot their names. That’s how the movie is set up. There’s a lot of different races in the main focus group. The country is never named. I suppose this is done so you just look at the situation and the characters and see how this would be if it happened anywhere in our modern world. It really reminded me a lot of Children of Men. But Children of Men was better. I don’t remember cringing watching it like I did with this movie. I guess it was just too intense. Rape scene, horrible filthy stuff all over the place, you really just felt the hopelessness the people were going through. And yeah everything aint all sunshine and roses but shit. I was all hyped up to see it like oooh this is gonna be good and I just had to shake myself off after I saw it. Good thing I hopped into a perkier movie afterwards (see: review for Nick and Norah…..
…Now)
destiny - by Haki Madhubuti
15 years ago
1 comment:
Finally, someone else in the world who suffered through the 120 minutes of existence named "Blindness." I popped into this movie because 1) i was late for the movie i originally came to see and had to buy tix for a later showtime and 2) i was hyped by the concept in the trailer thinking this was going to be awesome. Well, once again I come to the cliché knowledge about hindsight... no pun intended. There were way too many questions left unanswered in this movie for the plot to make sense for most sensible people. The tribal conflicts in the quarantine, the ostracism the afflicted suffered from the guards, the (consensual) rape for food exchange, the husband's sexual conquest of another (blind) woman, the wife's understanding of her husband's infidelity after witnessing it, the (initial) necessity to keep the wife's vision a secret inside the quarantine, etc all just made the movie hard to watch and worse reconcile as understandable. This film seems like it was someone's attempt to ride the coattails with a "meaningful" twist to the end of civilization genre movies that have been hitting theatres. Sadly, their attempt missed the mark by a mile.
Anyway, I hate that i didn't follow the trail of people skipping out of theatre, as I sat there really hoping this movie would turn out for the better. Needles to say, I was wrong. And, the miraculous return of vision to one of the blind guys at the end was just so unbearably stupid i wanted to puke. Like, thanks for the glimmer of hope before rolling the credits jackass. I wonder how the Razzies are going to treat this one come nomination time...
Good thing for me I was able to catch the movie I originally intended to see afterward, Miracle at St. Anna, which was all things great about autumn movies and Spike Lee. Like, dude found a way to open the movie with the murder of a random white guy. LOL... that shyt is awesome!
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