Direc­tor Fer­nando Meirelles has exam­ined des­per­ate pres­sure cook­ers City of God) and insti­tu­tional cor­rup­tion (The Con­stant Gar­dener) before. Blind­ness proves per­fect to meld both themes, with a sci­ence fic­tion twist imag­in­ing the down­fall of civ­i­liza­tion itself.

Blind­ness is part of a spe­cial sub­set of the horror/sci-fi/disaster genre: the dystopian end-of-civilization night­mare. Whereas the typ­i­cal entry works by intro­duc­ing a dis­rupt­ing ele­ment into the sta­tus quo (typ­i­cally a mon­ster), a few instead sub­tract one fun­da­men­tal fact of life that we take for granted. The basic recipe is sim­ple: flip one switch, and watch civ­i­liza­tion fall in short order. In Chil­dren of Men (read The Dork Report review), human­ity becomes infer­tile. In the Hap­pen­ing (read The Dork Report review), the bios­phere starts pump­ing out poi­son. In the comic book series Y: The Last Man, all males on the planet sud­denly die off. In innu­mer­able zom­bie flicks (read The Dork Report’s George A. Romero Zom­bie Cycle), death is no longer absolute. It may not be a coin­ci­dence that at least two mem­bers of the Blind­ness cast already have rel­e­vant expe­ri­ence on their résumés: Julianne Moore in Chil­dren of Men and Alice Braga in I Am Legend.

“The only thing more ter­ri­fy­ing than blind­ness is being the only one who can see.”

All of these sto­ries bleed over into the genre realms of sci­ence fic­tion and hor­ror. Blind­ness, how­ever, is based on the mag­i­cal real­ist (if it’s accu­rate for me to call it that) novel by José Sara­m­ago. The novel is set in a generic city, fea­tur­ing unnamed char­ac­ters (the movie, filmed in São Paulo, Brazil, effec­tively pre­serves both con­ceits — I didn’t notice until the cred­its rolled that the char­ac­ters did not have names). With­out get­ting bogged down in pseudo-scientific details, Zara­m­ago posits a highly con­ta­gious “White Blind­ness” that rapidly sweeps the globe, affect­ing every­one but one ran­dom woman. The movie’s expla­na­tion is a far more lit­eral highly com­mu­ni­ca­ble dis­ease, diag­nosed for the audi­ence by the unnamed opthamol­o­gist “Doc­tor” (Mark Ruf­falo). By sheer coin­ci­dence, The Doctor’s Wife (Moore) appears to be immune. The obvi­ous chal­lenge for the film­mak­ers is how to ren­der a prose story about blind­ness into the most visual sto­ry­telling medium of all. Cin­e­matog­ra­pher César Char­lone (who also shot City of God and The Con­stant Gar­dener) meets the chal­lenge by cre­at­ing stun­ning visu­als which para­dox­i­cally obscure. The pic­ture fre­quently flares into a burned-out white­ness, often a relief from the ugly filth in which the char­ac­ters find them­selves liv­ing as the safety net of soci­ety collapses.

The story bru­tally details a basi­cally pes­simistic view of human nature. Right from the start, humanity’s inher­ent greed and avarice make a cat­a­strophic sit­u­a­tion worse. The very first vic­tim of the dis­ease is imme­di­ately exploited by a car thief (ironic, as auto­mo­biles are shortly to become the most futile of valu­ables to steal). As the blind­ness dis­ease spreads, the author­i­ties (rep­re­sented by The Min­is­ter of Health, in what amounts to a cameo by San­dra Oh) attempt to con­tain the infected in iso­la­tion wards, a weak euphemism for con­cen­tra­tion camps. As The Man With the Black Eye Patch (Danny Glover) states in a nicely writ­ten but implau­si­bly elo­quent mono­logue, “the dis­ease was immune to bureaucracy.”

“I know that part inside you with no name, and that’s who we are, right?”

The infected are made up of char­ac­ters from many cul­tural and eco­nomic back­grounds, much like Ale­jan­dro González Iñárritu’s Babel (2006). Left alone to self-organize, two oppos­ing soci­eties coa­lesce around two very dif­fer­ent nat­ural lead­ers. The Doc­tor and his Wife cre­ate a frag­ile but func­tion­ing democ­racy, but the King of Ward Three (Gael Gar­cía Bernal) forges a depraved Sodom built on exploit­ing their few resources for short-term base plea­sures. Inevitably, the two fledg­ling states go to war, as much out of ide­ol­ogy as for want of resources. As the ward denizens’ cir­cum­stances get worse and worse, the movie itself becomes a pun­ish­ing expe­ri­ence to watch (an imi­ta­tive fal­lacy). In terms of depic­tions of vio­lence, it is no less explicit than, say, Chil­dren of Men, but wholly lacks that supe­rior film’s dark wit and essen­tial thread of hope. Whereas Chil­dren of Men had no real vil­lain (Luke, Chi­we­tel Ejio­for, was actu­ally more of a Che Guevarra-type rev­o­lu­tion­ary), there is lit­tle or no sub­tlety of char­ac­ter in Blind­ness’ wholly evil bad guys. Would the cen­tral alle­gory be more inter­est­ing to pon­der if the vil­lains were not so unam­bigu­ously mon­strous? Even I Am Leg­end dropped hints that its vampire/zombie-like mon­sters pos­sessed crude intel­li­gence, a will to live, and empa­thy for their own kind.

The frag­ile com­mu­nity in the wards dis­in­te­grates into a hell of gang rape and open war. Then, amaz­ingly, it gets worse. But as the walls of the prison burn, the pris­on­ers dis­cover the doors have actu­ally been left open. If any­thing, the world out­side has become worse off than the pres­sure cooker in which they were impris­oned. After a har­row­ing trip through the dev­as­tated city, they expe­ri­ence one fleet­ing moment of joy as they bathe in the rain. After­wards, they set up an eden in the Doc­tor and his Wife’s for­mer home, like a less-satiric ver­sion of the for­ti­fied sub­ur­ban shop­ping mall in George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (read The Dork Report review). The Doctor’s Wife’s newly extended fam­ily embraces her as their “leader with vision.”

Offi­cial movie site: http://blindness-themovie.com/

Buy the novel or DVD from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report.