With a cool sounding sci-fi premise and an obvious wealth of talent, Blindness should have been one of those rare movies that garners both nerd-cred and Oscar-acclaim. However, with plot-points so obvious that even the film’s blind characters should have seen coming, the film will probably fail pleasing either faction.
Director Fernando Meirelles (who has one great flick with City Of God, and one really good one with The Constant Gardener) comes armed with an impressive ensemble cast. The film features Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo, Danny Glover, Alice Braga and Gael Garcia Bernal – who steals the show as a great bad guy. The script for Blindness was written by Don McKellar, who isn’t exactly a household name, but was a natural fit for this project (check out the apocalyptic Last Night). Oh, and the film is also based on a book written by a freaking Nobel-laureate. So, yeah, on paper, Blindness it has a lot going for it.
Blindness opens in rush-hour traffic of an unnamed city, with a motorist discovering that his vision has been replaced by absolute whiteness. While his new found disability is mostly greeted by honks and curses, both a well-intentioned bystander and a thief come to the aid of the First Blind Man. No, I’m not being purposefully vague. That is in fact the character’s name. It is a subtle scene that foreshadows society’s descent into chaos, as well as set up the challenges to be faced by the newly disabled. However, as more people catch the ‘blindness’ epidemic, the movie begins it’s slow march into predictability.
The World Heath Initiative begins rounding up all the infected and quarantining them into army-guarded facilities. A now-blind optometrist (Mark Ruffalo) and his tagalong wife (Julianne Moore) – who can still see – are among the first of the facility’s residents.
Once inside the building, it’s made clear that the blind must fend for themselves with limited resources. And quicker than you can say “Lord of the Flies-esque allegory,” things go from bad to worse as the people struggle to survive while trying to build a new society. But, other than watching the characters further suffer (and suffer… and suffer even more), any social commentary offered by Blindness seems a little thin and tired.
Eventually, you have to just regulate yourself to siting back and watching things unfold as they get progressively and predictably worse. Ultimately, Blindness ends up being a movie with an astonishing pedigree, but a pretty pedestrian outcome.
While it’s later suggested that the blindness isn’t all that bad for some people, this never really makes sense given the horrors shown in the movie. The only exception would be the character who was blind before the ‘epidemic,’ and now finds himself in a new position of power within the facility. He was probably the most interesting character in the movie, as despicable as he was.
Don’t get me wrong, Blindness has some tense and horribly memorable scenes. It’s also beautifully shot… but it’s not exactly groundbreaking. Perhaps I should have gone into the movie blind of expectations.
