Blindness

I saw the movie Blindness this evening with Heather. The characters were believable, the pacing was good, the plot was somewhat unoriginal and obvious, and there were a couple great effects, although the whiteout effect is overused. It’s quite good overall.

The main character annoyed me in the wards where she didn’t use her sight more to her advantage. How about just taking the gun from the leader when he’s not looking? Or kick their walking canes out from under them. This isn’t rocket science here. She didn’t try anything until after she prostituted herself. If you’re going to be desperate enough to kill, I’d think it would happen before you submit to anything as degrading as that.

I was pleasantly surprised by the perspective given by the eye patch character near the end of the film of the ways in which the common blindness had brought people closer together, as with their small “family.” Until that point, much of what we had seen was how the blindness had driven people apart and reduced them to desperate savages, so it left us with a warm, fuzzy feeling that maybe humanity isn’t lost forever.

I thought a couple effects worked very well. The first was a blind boy who walked toward the camera and stumbled into a table not visible to him or us, but at that moment the table flashes into view for us. It’s a perfect analog for how we form images in our heads of our dark surroundings and update them as we stub our toes or bang our knees into unknown objects. The second (spoiler alert) represented someone regaining their sight: a blind sheet of white that resolved into sight of coffee darkening the cream in a cup. Those moments alone made up for the effect excesses elsewhere in the film.