If you like shocker drama, you'll probably enjoy Blindness.
Blindness begins as very promising. The editing and art direction cleverly shows peoples' mental states as they panic from not being able to see. Random people are struck blind and forced to live in a quarantined areas with limited resources and no links to the outside world. Julianne Moore pretends to be blind so she can stay with her husband. There's wonderful character development in the beginning, but the middle spirals downhill. For an hour in the middle logic is thrown out the window allowing for extremely graphic violence and sex.
Main characters allow idiotic things happen which can easily be stopped. I sat cringing through not 1, but 2 very long, brutal, rape/orgy scenes which could have been prevented. In the first scene, one of the women is beaten to death and continually raped. These scenes are very traumatic. Even if you cover your eyes, you can hear a man's graphic, verbal description of how he's raping a women. If I had been warned about them, I would not have chosen to watch this film. Julianne Moore has a weapon, can see, but goes along with being raped, stands by her husband after he has sex with another women in the cafeteria and just wonders around powerless for 2/3 of the film as bullies horde the food. It's completely ridiculous. There's no discussion about the affair so Moore's forgiveness to her husband makes no sense. In fact she just hugs the other woman after watching them have sex.
There's also a lot of feces, trash and naked people scattered around (some having graphic sex). I get the message that things are bad, but the film just lingers in this state for an hour, so I found myself getting very bored. I don't need to stare at close ups of dogs devouring people for several minutes or people's pets starving or dead in their arms.
The ending is treated like a fairy tale (complete with Moore's blind husband coming in like the knight in shining armor. He somehow finds Moore in a mob and rescues her). People get their sight back and Julianne Moore has sex with her husband again like nothing bad just happened. Everyone's happy. There's a scene with 3 women showering that seems thrown in to show more nudity.
Blindness focuses little on the process of how society outside the quarantine area collapses and rebuilds itself. That's what I was hoping to see, but it didn't happen.
The film left me feeling empty. The acting was fine, but I didn't learn anything new. Watching Blindness is a journey that I would not want take again. You also never learn what actually caused the blindness.
Blindness begins as very promising. The editing and art direction cleverly shows peoples' mental states as they panic from not being able to see. Random people are struck blind and forced to live in a quarantined areas with limited resources and no links to the outside world. Julianne Moore pretends to be blind so she can stay with her husband. There's wonderful character development in the beginning, but the middle spirals downhill. For an hour in the middle logic is thrown out the window allowing for extremely graphic violence and sex.
Main characters allow idiotic things happen which can easily be stopped. I sat cringing through not 1, but 2 very long, brutal, rape/orgy scenes which could have been prevented. In the first scene, one of the women is beaten to death and continually raped. These scenes are very traumatic. Even if you cover your eyes, you can hear a man's graphic, verbal description of how he's raping a women. If I had been warned about them, I would not have chosen to watch this film. Julianne Moore has a weapon, can see, but goes along with being raped, stands by her husband after he has sex with another women in the cafeteria and just wonders around powerless for 2/3 of the film as bullies horde the food. It's completely ridiculous. There's no discussion about the affair so Moore's forgiveness to her husband makes no sense. In fact she just hugs the other woman after watching them have sex.
There's also a lot of feces, trash and naked people scattered around (some having graphic sex). I get the message that things are bad, but the film just lingers in this state for an hour, so I found myself getting very bored. I don't need to stare at close ups of dogs devouring people for several minutes or people's pets starving or dead in their arms.
The ending is treated like a fairy tale (complete with Moore's blind husband coming in like the knight in shining armor. He somehow finds Moore in a mob and rescues her). People get their sight back and Julianne Moore has sex with her husband again like nothing bad just happened. Everyone's happy. There's a scene with 3 women showering that seems thrown in to show more nudity.
Blindness focuses little on the process of how society outside the quarantine area collapses and rebuilds itself. That's what I was hoping to see, but it didn't happen.
The film left me feeling empty. The acting was fine, but I didn't learn anything new. Watching Blindness is a journey that I would not want take again. You also never learn what actually caused the blindness.