Never compelling
Added 3/11/2010
This major studio sci-fi horror film has the feel of an indie, and it starts as a routine mystery story before morphing into a much darker tale about a blindness epidemic. The makers try to make a metaphor out of it for how and why blindness changes things in big and little ways and how humans are all one etc etc. I was never very involved in the tale, though, and actually paused it repeatedly over two days before I could get through it. Not a good sign. Photography tricks throughout to make the viewer feel blind get annoying quickly.
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Blindness
Added 2/24/2010
A city is ravaged by an epidemic of instant "white blindness". Those first afflicted are quarantined by the authorities in an abandoned mental hospital where the newly created "society of the blind" quickly breaks down. Criminals and the physically powerful prey upon the weak, hording the meager food rations and committing horrific acts. There is however one eyewitness to the nightmare. A woman whose sight is unaffected by the plague follows her afflicted husband to quarantine. There, keeping her sight a secret, she guides seven strangers who have become, in essence, a family. She leads them out of quarantine and onto the ravaged streets of the city, which has seen all vestiges of civilization crumble. This movie is much slower, much dirtier, and more real. The point of the movie was the human element and not the action. It is great. This movie is dirty to watch and will leave you feeling dirty. In a very adult, intelligent, thought-provoking manner.
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GOOD PREMISE, BUT..........! 2 1/2 STARS!
Added 2/3/2010
While this film has a good premise and I was generally interested in it, I found the film too long and too many ridiculous situations kept it from being the great movie it could have been. The story of an unknown plague that is making people go blind is both intriguing and unsettling.
The government forces the infected to be corralled in an old abandon quarantine site. What bothered me most in this film is when a small group of these infected take over the complex with one pistol and start rationing food for money and sex to the rest of the infected, the only person who can see in the complex, goes along with letting these scum rape her and the other women. These people are blind!?, how hard would it be to just walk up and crack this guy in the head with a pipe? I know they have a blind person on their side who was blind since birth giving them an advantage over the others, but this is a very noisy and disgustingly smelly place and no amount of blind training would make it possible to hear or smell anyone getting close to you. It's just ridiculous as this women is presented as a very brave person who opts to go into this place to take care of her husband.
Another problem is that it is just too long and drawn out with long stretches of unnecessary scenes. Overall I think this film is worth a look because of the idea, a scary thought that how something like this could completely over turn our lives and the human race.
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Anything but clear cut
Added 2/2/2010
In my opinion, this movie was very well done. I tend to be one of those people who likes a clear cut open and closed movie, and I'm definitely one that dislikes open-endings. However, I thought this movie was great. It left many things untold (such as why did they all go blind? what cured it? etc.) but that's because it didn't want you to focus on those facts. The movie wanted you to focus on the break-down of society in the hopes of preserving ones' self. The ward in which they stayed started out as an acceptable place to be, however the guards were too afraid of becoming infected to listen to these people when conditions became unbearable. It showed how not understanding how or why something is happening can lead to dehumanizing and fear. I felt that it brought up some interesting moral dilemmas, especially concerning the food for sex issue the characters encountered towards the end of the film.
I thought the directors use of blurred and dark scenes as well as accentuating white helped to understand the life these people were being forced to live. It evoked empathy for the main character and for those who became blind.
I think that it was a great look at human nature and had a few interesting scenes concerning religion.
Definitely a thought provoking and, at times, shocking film.
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Blindness: Lack of Gnosis
Added 1/18/2010
The story is about an epidemic of blindness and the social breakdown that follows when people have to be quarantined in a concentration camp like scenario and is based on José Saramago's novel Essay on Blindness. It depicts the nature of our humanity giving some insights about our raison d'être and how fear, sex and hunger rules our basic drives bringing misery and chaos. It also portrays pathological people quite well, that is people without conscience nor empathy which are driven by their predatory natures in quite a different way than the rest of normal human beings.
At the beginning of the movie, when the first case of blindness appear, a doctor is brainstorming with his wife about the cause of the disease. He says that it seems to be a case of agnosia which refers to the inability to recognize people or objects even when basic sensory modalities, such as vision, are intact. The wife points out the word gnosis in agnosia and wanders if there is a relation, "lack of gnosis". This was quite interesting and appropriate considering what I was about to see in the rest of the movie. Gnosis is a greek word which means knowledge, specially about esoteric matters. The word implies experiential, lived or revealed knowledge as opposed to information acquired second hand, from books for example. Boris Mouravieff wrote about this knowledge in his book Gnosis, I'll quote here a few paragraphs:
"Homo Sapiens lives immersed in his everyday life to a point where he forgets himself and forgets where he is going; yet, without feeling it, he knows that death cuts off everything. How can we explain that the intellectual who has made marvelous discoveries and the technocrat who has exploited them have left outside the field of their investigations the ending of our lives? How can we explain that a science which attempts everything and claims everything nevertheless remains indifferent to the enigma revealed by the question of death? How can we explain why Science, instead of uniting its efforts with its older sister Religion to resolve the problem of Being - which is also the problem of death - has in fact opposed her?"
"Whether a man dies in bed or aboard an interplanetary ship, the human condition has not changed in the slightest. Happiness? But we are taught that happiness lasts only as long as the Illusion lasts... and what is this Illusion? Nobody knows. But it submerges us."
"If we only knew what Illusion is, we would then know the opposite: what Truth is. This Truth would liberate us from slavery. As a psychological phenomenon, has Illusion ever been subjected to critical analysis based on the most recent discoveries of science? It does not seem to be so, and yet one cannot say that man is lazy and does not search. He is a passionate searcher ... but he misses the essential; he bypasses it in his search. What strikes us from the very beginning is that man confuses moral progress with technical progress, so that the development of science continues in dangerous isolation. The brilliant progress that has come from technology has changed nothing essential in the human condition, and will change nothing, because it operates only in the field of everyday events. For this reason it touches the inner life of man only superficially. Yet from very ancient times it has been known that the essential is found within man, not outside him."
It was not surprising that near the end of the movie, when the doctor's wife was finally freed from her containment, she entered a church where all the main religious figures had handkerchiefs blinding their eyes. The movie is strong and quite traumatizing for its characters, so be cautioned, it might not be quite the movie for you.
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