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Blindness
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MPAA RATING: R for violence including sexual assaults, language and sexuality/nudity.
Starring Mark Ruffalo, Julianne Moore, Gael Garcia Bernal, Sandra Oh, and Danny Glover
It begins in a flash, as one man is instantaneously struck blind while driving home from work, his whole world suddenly turned to an eerie, milky haze. One by one, each person he encounters – his wife, his doctor, even the seemingly good Samaritan who gives him a lift home – will in due course suffer the same unsettling fate. As the contagion spreads, and panic and paranoia set in across the city, newly blind victims of the “White Sickness” are rounded up and quarantined within a crumbling, abandoned mental asylum, where all semblance of ordinary life begins to break down. (Miramax Films)
| GENRE(S): | Drama | Mystery | Romance | Suspense/Thriller |
| WRITTEN BY: | Don McKellar |
| DIRECTED BY: | Fernando Meirelles |
| RELEASE DATE: | Theatrical: October 3, 2008 |
| RUNNING TIME: | 120 minutes, Color |
| ORIGIN: | Canada | Brazil | Japan |
| LANGUAGE(S): | English | Japanese |
All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...
The average user rating for this movie is 6.5 (out of 10) based on 36 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
Holly R. gave it an8:
This movie was a good study of human behavior when people become vulnerable and helpless. It is a study of human character under a crisis. If you are interested in psychology and/or human nature, you will quite like this movie. I liked the way it was filmed (stark) and felt it was a powerful movie. (I have a degree in psychology and love Sci-Fi.) Julianne Moore did a great job!
Sean gave it a4:
Difficult slog. The descent into moral depravity was too quick, too easy, too unbelievable to be explained by mere blindness. Too many people standing idly by when EVERYTHING about their situation should have demanded more strident action, more intelligent and more organized a response. I felt frustrated and angered by the patheticness of it all--even the incomprehensible inability of the soldiers to respond in a minimally meaningful or conciliatory fashion was pointlessly baffling. This is a movie where the details felt entirely disingenuous and ridiculous, as if every possible Orwellian fault was systematically exposed before being played to the hilt. Somehow, though, the overall setting/plot device somehow managed to remain both plausible and quite strong in its impact. Some solid acting saved this for me... but still nothing stellar. A week later and I didn't think of it once until I was reminded of it on this site. It could have been great had real people been blinded instead of a loose conglomeration of hypothetical constructs.
Chad S. gave it a7:
This happening is steeped in literary origins; one by one, big city denizens are embroiled in an epidemic of mass blindness, a condition that's symptomatic of an all-encompassing commonality: The world is going blind. "Blindness", the Nobel Prize-winning novel by Jose Saramengo, in spite of its heightened language and scope, like Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale", is unmistakably a work of speculative fiction, which becomes more readily apparent with this servicable adaptation that probably does a disservice to the celebrated Portugese writer, since the film invites easy comparisons to M. Night Shyamalan's "The Happening" and Danny Boyle's "28 Days Later". "Blindness" plays out like an art house B-picture. In place of blind people, insert zombies; while the zombies are blind to their own humanity, some of the quarantined people at the staging area are blind to inhumanity, as the King of Ward Three(Gael Garcia Bernal) and his minions, pillage the food and rape the women. Thankfully, the filmmaker is mindful of Sarmengo's literary pedigree; he resists the temptation to put his own stamp on the material, unlike an egotist such as Shyamalan, who given the opportunity to adapt "Blindness", might have provided his own adducement behind this inexplicable outbreak of spontaneous unseeing, and transform the Saramengo novel into a tree happening. This laborious, but passionate piece of filmmaking, coaxes science fiction out from the narrative's closet, much to the chagrin of the Nobel Prize committee. It's the Richard Matheson short story reimagined as "I Am Blind".
Brandon B gave it a1:
Really messed up rape scene. It was literally the worst movie ever. I would like to punch the director in the face for wasting my time. It's all so clear why people pirate movies..movies like this really don't help their cause.
Aidan W gave it a1:
This movie was garbage. From the terrible dialogue to lame 'drama' it failed all over. The characters were not gripping. The story was poorly transcribed to the screen. The blind protested this for the wrong reason, not because it's offensive to the blind, but because it's offensive anyone who paid money to see this.
Carol gave it a0:
One of the absolutely worst movies I've seen. I almost (and should have) walked out. No explanation for anything in a movie which debases everything and everyone.
Michael S. gave it an8:
Fernando Meirelles' ambitious film "BLINDNESS" aims for Oscar contention, but is more realistically going to end up a cult classic in the near future. Many will hate it, some will love it. I'd say it's an 8/10.
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