Product Description

A doctor's wife becomes the only person with the ability to see in a town where everyone is struck with a mysterious case of sudden blindness. She feigns illness in order to take care of her husband as her surrounding community breaks down into chaos and disorder. Based on a novel by Nobel Prize winner Jose Saramago.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #16497 in DVD
• Brand: Buena Vista Home Video
• Released on: 2009-02-10
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
• Formats: AC-3, Color, Dolby, DVD, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
• Original language: English
• Subtitled in: English, Spanish
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 120 minutes

Features

• From acclaimed director Fernando Meirelles (THE CONSTANT GARDENER) comes this extraordinarily intense and gritty thriller that will change your vision of the world forever. Led by a powerful all-star cast featuring Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo and Danny Glover, this unflinching story begins when a plague of blindness strikes and threatens all of humanity. One woman (Moore) feigns the illness to sh

Amazon.com
Based on José Saramago's allegorical novel, Blindness is a haunting film that works like an unusual fusion of fable and gritty suspense. Julianne Moore and Mark Ruffalo star as an unnamed, married couple living in an unidentified city where a mass epidemic of blindness hits. Ruffalo's character, a doctor, is affected, but Moore's is not. When the two are transferred to a government-run quarantine facility complete with armed guards, they soon find themselves in a rapidly deteriorating situation. Criminals take over food distribution and extort possessions and sex from the innocent. Sanitation becomes a thing of the past. More subtly, rules that might govern one's judgement and behavior on an everyday basis simply vanish, and personal and collective values rewrite themselves. Moore's character hides the fact that she can see (except from her spouse), and thus becomes the audience's surrogate in the thick of so much misery. She also becomes an avenging angel at exactly the right time, and then a matriarch when the action shifts from the quarantine hell to the city's streets. The latter part of Blindness finds a handful of the inmates (played by Danny Glover and Alice Braga, among others) joining Moore and Ruffalo in a kind of post-apocalypse oasis, a chapter as touching as the previous chapters were nightmarish.

Director Fernando Meirelles deftly captures the film's spirit of mixed parable and horror, grounding the action but at the same time encouraging a viewer not to take it too literally. He honors Saramago's creative depiction of blindness not as a field of black but, in this case, as an ocean of white. He also does some tricky, disorienting things with the camera, shooting at odd angles, putting his frame around strange details in a scene--all of it has a way of giving a viewer a feeling of what it's like to perceive the world in a whole new way. --Tom Keogh

Customer Reviews

Not for everybody
{Attention - The following review contains spoilers so be warned.}

This movie is not for everyone and I'm in the camp of "It's not for me." I wasn't really bothered by unexplained subjects in the movie such as - where the blindness came from, why only one character still had sight, what country/city the movie was taking place in, even the open ending quality of the last scene didn't faze me (though I think these things might annoy other viewers). I just didn't find this movie necessarily thought provoking or exceptionally well done simply because of it's depiction of a group of people (most likely a metaphor for larger society) gradually succumbing to desperation after being put and left in deplorable conditions. I've seen this kind of story line done other times . . . (Lord of the Flies comes to mind) and I never get the fascination. Just because a story is dark and depressing doesn't make it magic gold for me.

Part of my dislike for the movie stems from what I found to be scenes done more to shock the unsuspecting eyes of the audience then to some how convey the story line better. For instance I had issues with the graphic rapping of the women (which seems to be a favorite form of victimization writers put in these movies). Just the scene of the women coming back from ward 3, weak, beaten up, and carrying the naked dead body of one of the women is enough, in my opinion, to get the point across. But the director felt the need to show as much debasing and violence done to the women as he could get away with. (From my understanding the rape scene was meant to be longer but some female audience members in the 1st screenings of the movie were getting up and walking out so the director edited it - [...]Another issue that bothered me was the way the film was directed. Every glare or white surface area shown in the film suddenly became hyper-white . . . meaning the whiteness just got over exaggerated. Some people may find that a nice creative touch, but I found it annoying after awhile right along with the weird blurring and awkward camera angles.

Notwithstanding, some of the plot details left me sitting there like "I get the feeling they're going for a realistic approach with this movie but . . . Do they expect me to believe this?" For Example -

-Why would a guy who suddenly goes blind while driving opt to just go home instead of going to the hospital right away?

-I just can't see a person who is standing in the middle of a cross walk, who looks reasonably sane, pleading for help and getting ignored by everyone around him. Not even the drivers of the cars that are managing to avoid running him over call out a simple "Get the hell of the street!" to him.

-Why would the guards at the facility who have been talking to the blind people all along (though primarily through a bull horn . . . ) suddenly see a stray man leave a line and rather than say "stop where you're at" or even "get back in line", they don't say a word but decide to shot the guy instead?

(I feel like there was this straining right from the beginning of the movie to show this "see . . . see how cruel humans are?" theme even before societal structures broke down and conditions deteriorated into madness.)

-Oh and like another reviewer mentioned - just how many bullets was in that gun being waved around by the King of Ward 3? There was never any mention that the King had more ammunition. There was never any scene of him or Mr. Blind-from-Birth reloading the gun. Yet they just kept firing away like they had a magical gun that never ran out of bullets.

-And I have to say, if these people in the facility were on the edge . . . at one point willing to do anything for food, why revolt and killing the tormentors never seemed like a reasonable option is a mystery to me. The oppressors only had one gun and the two other wards put together theoretically out number Ward 3. I'm thinking Ward 3 could have been over powered with enough reasonable planning. But I guess such action would not go with the overall running theme of showing humans as deplorable, pathetic, and worst than rabid animals.

But anyway, if you honestly enjoy watching movies that are "base, shocking, [and] violent" or like movies that result in "conversation about the deplorable nature of humanity in the face of adversity" than this movie would be for you. Some of the other issues I had with this movie probably wouldn't bother you. But for the rest of us I guess we'll stick to something else.

Great Book. Ok Production, Poor Adaptation.
Jose Saramago's Blindness is a brilliant masterpiece on human blindness. The theme of blindness is an allegory. This is not the sci-fi film some people (that didn't read the book, might I add) thought I would be, hence, the transient blindness suffered by the characters needs not be explained like a zombie pandemic.
Having said that, this movie is a straight, scene to scene adaptation from the book, and that's it's biggest weakness. Much of, if not absolutely all of Saramago's prose and poetry is lost, creating an austere and rustic feel. It doesn't leave clear the fact that you're watching a literary event. It's not the story you tell it's how well you tell it. And this retelling leave much to be desired.
Screenwriter takes the safest journey, from a to b leaving all the subtext and commentary of the human condition, which, is the book's main concern.
Also, production wise this movie is okay and nothing more. The actors are all top notch but the camera prefers to point at the production design and blur randomly and purposeless here and there. The attention given to the film's look is obvious from the very start but a dirtier look would have fitted it better. The white backdrop that affects the entire movie (a la THX) feels too gimmicky and is counterproductive to the story, as they never tie it in properly with the white blindness theme.
All of the remarkable political comment intended by the author is unfortunately utterly and completely gone.
Book adaptations never quiet satisfy everyone. I've seen very little cases where the film actually compares with the book (Stephen King's The Shawshank Redemption, Michael Cunningham's The Hours come to mind) and I'm guessing this movie would have benefited from Fran Walsh or David Hare as screenwriters, or even a more humble production leaving the actor do what they do.
In conclusion, read the book even if you hated the movie. It's not bad but judging by the book's potential something grandiose could have come out of this.
The book is a fantastic read, at times funny, at times sad, always cunning, at moments even uncomfortable but overall a satisfying experience.

almost made me wish I'd gone blind
I just watched this last night and thought it was plotless, pointless and painful.

There were so many holes in this movie. Here are just a few...
There's no way that sick people in a quarantine situation would be locked in some old, run down building and left to fend for themselves. The sick would be cared for and studied, not threatened at gun point.

People's reactions were so unbelievable and had me shaking my head thru the whole thing. If you'd suddenly found you'd gone blind would you let some joker drive you home or would you be freaking out and want someone to call 911 and get you to a hospital? Freaking and 911 for $500, Alex.

Why didn't the 2 wards who were being harassed by the bad guys join ranks and fight back? They had the only person with vision and easily out numbered the baddies. Instead they just let the women go and be raped.

How many friggin bullets did the bad dude have? He just kept shooting and shooting and never seemed to run out.

Why didn't Julianne Moore's character kill him with her cleverly stashed scissors before he forced her to give him head? That would've been a whole lot smarter.

Was her husband really so horny that he couldn't keep his hands off the hooker chick? I mean, really, they're blind, they're being held against their will, they're filthy, hungry and terrified...and he gets a boner? That was one of the most ridiculous parts in the whole flick.

and the stupid 'artsy' camera work was bloody annoying as was the boring dialogue. I just really wish I'd listened to the critics for this one and opted to not see it. It SUCKED!

the only reason I gave it the 2 stars that I did is because, altho the movie blew big time, the acting was really well done.