Eye Candy #292 - "Blindness"

Blindness:  An end-of-the-world picture about a plague of blindness that strikes down humanity and the subsequent treatment of one another once 4 billion or so people go blind simultaneously.  The film focuses on the first group of victims who are quarantined in an old sanitarium.  As their numbers swell, the conditions grow worse and worse, and their “society” in the sanitarium goes all Lord of the Flies.  On one side, an optometrist (Mark Ruffalo) and his wife (Julianne Moore) are some of the first victims of the plague, though she retains her ability to see and hides it from both the other victims and their military guards.  In their Ward 1, they try and lead an egalitarian group of victims that care for one another.  Opposing them is Ward 3, led by their “king” (Gael Garcia Bernal), who take what they want by force, whether it be food, women, or worse.  Ostensibly a “thriller”, this film takes its time, clocking in around 2 hours long and is thoroughly depressing (not surprising, just depressing).  If the message is “we as people really all do suck”, that point is certainly driven home (and gets driven home in most films of that sub-genre), with our deliverance apparently arriving only in the form of dumb luck.  I’m a big fan of Fernando Meirelles’ “City of God”, but he is obviously making capital-A Art here, and his little visual tricks and fun with lenses and filters is distracting and gets in the way of the story.  Worth watching but I don’t necessarily see the point.  Woodchuck sez, “Par for the course, nothing new here.”