Blindness (2008)
Average Rating: 5.2/10
Reviews Counted: 154
Fresh: 66 | Rotten: 88
This allegorical disaster film about society's reaction to mass blindness is mottled and self-satisfied; provocative but not as interesting as its premise implies.
Average Rating: 4.9/10
Critic Reviews: 36
Fresh: 9 | Rotten: 27
This allegorical disaster film about society's reaction to mass blindness is mottled and self-satisfied; provocative but not as interesting as its premise implies.
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Average Rating: 3.1/5
User Ratings: 60,917
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Movie Info
Fernando Meirelles' adaptation of Nobel Prize-winning author José Saramago's novel Blindness begins when an epidemic of blindness strikes the world. Mark Ruffalo stars as an eye doctor who awakens one morning to find that he suffers from the unexplained disorder. He, along with other victims, is sent to a government detention center so that they can be quarantined. His wife (Julianne Moore) pretends to be blind so that she can be with him inside the institution. Their time in the center grows
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Cast
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Julianne Moore
Doctor's Wife -
Mark Ruffalo
Doctor -
Alice Braga
Woman With Dark Glasses -
Yusuke Iseya
First Blind Man -
Yoshino Kimura
First Blind Man's Wife -
Don McKellar
Thief -
Maury Chaykin
Accountant -
Mitchell Nye
Boy -
Danny Glover
Man With Black Eye Patc... -
Gael García Bernal
Bartender, King of Ward... -
Sandra Oh
Minister of Health -
Jason Bermingham
Driver 1 -
Fabiana Gugli
mother of the boy
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Blindness Trailer & Photos
All Critics (160) | Top Critics (36) | Fresh (71) | Rotten (89) | DVD (17)
I have to admire a mainstream movie that's so overwhelmingly bleak, but that's the only real distinction of this dystopian sci-fi drama.
Top CriticSadly, 'Blindness' may realise its director's worst fear: to produce not only an exploitation B-movie but one, paradoxically, spoiled by its own integrity and misplaced 'artistic' mise-en-scčne and intentions.
Stilted, claustrophobic and more stylish than substantial.
Set in a nameless English-speaking city where people are suddenly stricken with sightlessness, it's an allegory that never rises to the level of believability.
Blindness is a glum, ugly film, and pretentious in the bargain. But, perhaps least excusable, it is a fundamentally ill-conceived film, the visual depiction of a world without sight.
It's a beautiful car that never quite cranks up. The book is deep allegory, lost in time and place, describing a suffocating little world. It's hard to get at that in cinematic form.
Give this one a go guys, you'll see the world anew.
The picture is elongated to a punishing two hours of suffering, infuriatingly slavish screenwriting, and a director who should be gifted the miracle of a tripod this upcoming holiday season.
Like the film's thematic elements, the camera trickery comes off as unnecessarily pretentious, the sort of thing film students applaud while mainstream audiences yawn.
It's hard to explain all the vitriol aimed at Meirelles' film, which is a beautifully shot picture that is as haunting and profound as it is thought-provoking.
Takes the post-apocalyptic themes of Children of Men and blends it with the jaded morality of Lord of the Flies to questionable success
Blindness is a film that is trying to come off as organic and artsy, but feels too contrived.
No matter how you look at this film, it is a chilling look at what makes us tick at our very basic nature.
Glover's occasional all-knowing commentary and the dreary music score dull the edges of what was bound to be a challenging project.
The film is far from dull or careless but it's not convincing as a lesson in human frailty. If you're going to subject us to this much degradation, it has to be irresistibly believable, not just relentless.
As a study of human nature under pressure, focusing on the crimes we commit as well as the bonds of solidarity we forge, it's unremittingly dour.
Blindness is not unmissable, and has awkwardly implausible moments, but it succeeds in sucking us into its peculiar world.
Blindness is a worthy film, and in many ways a beautifully made one - the opening and closing sequences are the best. But in between it's heavy, gloomy and at times pretty hard to sit through.
An irritating experience
Blindness - despite its director, despite its pedigree as a respected piece of modern literature, despite its stellar cast - is a bitter disappointment.
Audience Reviews for Blindness
Super Reviewer
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- First Blind Man: It's you.
- Doctor's Wife: What?
- First Blind Man: It's you. I can see.
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Latest News on Blindness
February 9, 2009:
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October 2, 2008:
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October 2, 2008:
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Foreign Titles
- Die Stadt der Blinden (DE)
- A ciegas (ES)
Surprisingly closest companion piece to Fernando Meirelles Blindness is Danny Boyle's much more interesting and succesfull 28 days later. Even when it flirted heavily with horror-genre it was much more philosophical film about humans versus humans. It also had some true originality in it, something that Blindness is mostly lacking.
Director Meirelled is more interested in annoying camera effects like mixing bright whites with more murkier tones. I find this technique highly pretentious and unnecessary. You could also argue about all that detailed sadism, nudity and torture that Meirelles is is rubbing our faces. Is it truly so necessary to go into so extreme lenghts just to tell how sick we humans are when we are given too much power? Sometimes less is more and that is most certainly a one thing that Meirelles and his screenwriter Don McKellar has not understood when they have started to work with this material.