The Good

Storyline

A neat sto­ry­line adapted from SOME­ONES NOVEL, Blind­ness takes place in cur­rent day earth, where a strange and unex­plained ill­ness starts spread­ing. People start going blind - seeing white - even though they are oth­er­wise per­fectly healthy. Those afflicted are soon spir­ited away to an aban­doned asylum to be quar­an­tined. The main male lead, “Doctor” accord­ing to IMDB, is one of the afflicted and as he is car­ried off, his wife (Doctor’s Wife) dives into the truck. As the movie pro­gresses and more and more people lose their sight, the Wife main­tains her sight despite every­one around her being infected.

The story over­all moved me in both good and bad ways. It depressed me con­sid­er­ing how accu­rate some of the actions in the story really were. It scared me to know that people could and would react in the ways that they did. It inspired me that some could act with the courage required to hold people together.

Music

The musi­cal score is subtle and at many tines haunt­ing. It com­pli­mented most scenes and added that extra level that really drove things home. Some of the more dis­turb­ing scenes were really made that much more upset­ting by the sound­track and actual lack of music. I cannot explain fur­ther with­out giving things away, but trust me when I say that Blind­ness stepped over some lines with what they did.

The Bad

Plot devices

Every­where. Every-​frigging-​where. If you know what you’re doing, you can pretty much read how the movie is going to go… mostly. If you read into scenes and see what’s going on, you know what will happen later on. I called more things than I really wanted to, which is always depress­ing. TV with a guy on it? Yup. Only person who can see finds scis­sors? Yup. The only person that can see finds a gro­cery store’s back room? Yup. The list goes on.

The plot devices were easily the second most annoy­ing thing with the entire movie. They seem to be almost overly obvi­ous some­times, seem­ingly thrown in your face, just in case you missed it. Other seem­ing plot devices are brought up for no other point than to tie things back to some random page in the novel. Very depressing.

RANDOM SHIT WHAT THE HELL

What’s a good idea when your wife is the only person that can see - as far as you know of - in the whole world? Sleep with some random blind girl for no reason what­so­ever! That’s right, random affair that is basi­cally required so that Doctor and Wife can rec­on­cile later. Let’s sing on the radio. Lets have random naked people. Lets Include shower scenes for no real reason. Let’s have more naked people walk­ing down aban­doned high­ways, making sure that they’ve never once thought of per­sonal grooming.

I guess this also falls mostly into plot devices, but they were just so damned random that I feel they earned their own section.

Narration

The random and late intro­duced nar­ra­tion made me want to rip my ears off. Not only was 99% of it utterly point­less, but the other 1% of it felt rather self-​indulgent and utterly fake. It was easily the worst aspect to the film by far. I don’t even need to explain fur­ther; the Nar­ra­tion was atrocious.

The meh

Cinematography

I want to say that all the shots and all of the effects used were applied with a del­i­cate hand, accented the scenes, and were not in the least bit self-​indulgent. I would like to say that, but some of the shots were… dif­fi­cult to figure out, some of the shots totally done for the sake of the “sweet effect” and even more shots were dif­fi­cult to follow.

Some of the effects were impres­sive - the kid walk­ing into the table - was impres­sive, and I liked the use of a washed out colour-​palette; it helped with the gen­eral bleak feel­ing to the entire movie. The over-​use of the “blurry scenes” was hard to take.

The Acting

Some of the actors were good (Jul­liane Moore,Alice Braga), some were alright (Mark Ruf­falo, Yusuke Iseya), and some that should have been good fell on their faces (I’m look­ing at you Danny Glover). Some of the char­ac­ters felt so impres­sively stereo­typed that you can’t help but cringe. Jul­liane Moore - The Doctor’s Wife - does a fan­tas­tic job in the movie; an impor­tant fact given that the entire more is basi­cally cen­tred around her trying to sup­port everyone.

Over­all I liked it, but not as much as I should have. It had all the fix­ings for a great movie, but fell on its face some­where down the line.

6.5/10