Blindness 2008

This was more of a drama than a thriller but still i put it in thriller because of its plot which isn't superb but decent.I am a fan of Meirelles after Cidade de deus (i don't even have to mention it specifically) and Constant Gardener, but i was slightly let down after watching this movie but not to a great extent because this is one of the finest treatments such a movie could get but as it was from Meirelles i was expecting more.

The plot is something like this: In a city people start losing their eye sight and when an Opthalmologist himself loses his eye sight he becomes the first to be quarantined along with his wife who pretends to have lost her eye sight to stay with her husband.When more people are sent to the same building the doc's wife starts helping everyone but problem arises when one group of blind men start threatening and harassing the weaker ones.



Characters in the movie move along well with one another and have a good rapport.The casting is fantastic Julianne Moore and Gael Garcial Bernal are brilliant as always, even the support cast are not a matter of complaint.The cinematography has been taken care of well, scenes of harassment and tragedies are shown in a way that makes you sense them.

Meirelles' style is totally missing in this movie as he had wanted even the audience to be blinded at places and feel the way the victims do,but he has not quite achieved it i would say.The movie is realistic to a very large extent unlike the other epidemic movies but still the crispness in the scenes are not there consistently.There is no explanation to how only the doc's wife is immune to the disease but that really din't matter to me because i don't care about logic in a movie that much as far as i am entertained.

This movie did entertain me but not brilliantly.It is visually and thematically not at all inferior but if only something more crispy was added to this without making it more cheezier it could have been far more better.

6.5


UPON


10

I saw this a while back!
Let me think about what I'll say about it before I type more nonsense...

I agree about the casting, but I especially like Mark Ruffalo (since 13 going on 30) I know him from girlmovies and always KNEW in my GUT he could act and it's nice to be proven right about these things. I think Gael Garcial Bernal (jesus his name is hard to get straight) tries so hard to make more of his character than there really is so he gets an A for effort but really he was given this poor developed character... And Julianne Moore is beautiful, no matter how old she gets and this role almost seems to be written FOR her. But Danny Glover? What the hell yo... Oh we need an old black guy and Morgan Freeman is in the hospital uhh yeah what do we do...


And it's so easy to make the screen white, you know, change the opacity, to make the audience understand what it's like to go blind in just a matter of seconds but as a director you can't reuse the same trick 105 times in 1 movie. I feel like that aspect didn't get much thought put into it at all. I did like the story, I like how it doesn't all get explained. The ending leaves you a bit uneasy and unfulfilled which is crazy for a Hollywood movie, and different, I liked it!

I'm almost certain this story is based on a book, a very quaint one from the fifties, had something to do with flowers making people blind or something (does anyone know) so I kept waiting for some reference to this book but I guess it turned out different after all.

In any case, I must rate this movie a 7, if only for my proven gut feeling on Mark Ruffalo's hidden talent.

As an illustrator I must give extra snaps for the movie poster though! this is the first time i've seen it.

This* is the book written from which the movie is adapted and it is written by Jose Saramago.

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindness_(novel)

Suddenly I remember the book's title I was talking about: The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham (1951).
Too bad it is of no importance to the thread haha! But ah, thanks Deathproof, so it was based on a book...

I really liked it!
A good surprise for me after all the bad things I have heard about this movie
The movie is about human condition and human nature and the story is just an escuse to describe them. The atmosphere is wonderful