Blindness |  | Director: Fernando Meirelles
Actors: Maury Chaykin, Danny Glover, Julianne Moore, Don McKellar, Sandra Oh
Studio: MIRAMAX
Category: DVD
List Price: $29.99
Buy Used: $1.02
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Seller: Ambis Enterprises
Rating:  66 reviews
Sales Rank: 16892
Format: AC-3, Color, Dolby, DVD, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Subtitled), Spanish (Subtitled)
Rating: R (Restricted)
Region: 1
Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1
Number Of Discs: 1
Running Time: 120 Minutes
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.2
Dimensions (in): 7.5 x 5.4 x 0.6
MPN: 5841300
UPC: 786936775129
EAN: 0786936775129
ASIN: B001LLH8SE
Theatrical Release Date: 2008
Release Date: February 10, 2009
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| 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 |
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| Editorial Reviews:
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
Product Description
A city is ravaged by an epidemic of instant white blindess. Those first afflicted are quarantined by the authorities in an abandoned mental hospital where the newly created society of the blind quickly breaks down. Studio: Buena Vista Home Video Release Date: 02/10/2009 Starring: Danny Glover Maury Chaykin Run time: 120 minutes Rating: R Director: Fernando Meirelles
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 66
GOOD PREMISE, BUT..........! 2 1/2 STARS! February 3, 2010
! MR. KNOW IT ALL ;-b (TRI STATE AREA)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
While this film has a good premise and I was generally interested in it, I found the film too long and too many ridiculous situations kept it from being the great movie it could have been. The story of an unknown plague that is making people go blind is both intriguing and unsettling.
The government forces the infected to be corralled in an old abandon quarantine site. What bothered me most in this film is when a small group of these infected take over the complex with one pistol and start rationing food for money and sex to the rest of the infected, the only person who can see in the complex, goes along with letting these scum rape her and the other women. These people are blind!?, how hard would it be to just walk up and crack this guy in the head with a pipe? I know they have a blind person on their side who was blind since birth giving them an advantage over the others, but this is a very noisy and disgustingly smelly place and no amount of blind training would make it possible to hear or smell anyone getting close to you. It's just ridiculous as this women is presented as a very brave person who opts to go into this place to take care of her husband.
Another problem is that it is just too long and drawn out with long stretches of unnecessary scenes. Overall I think this film is worth a look because of the idea, a scary thought that how something like this could completely over turn our lives and the human race.
 Anything but clear cut February 2, 2010
Heather (New England)
In my opinion, this movie was very well done. I tend to be one of those people who likes a clear cut open and closed movie, and I'm definitely one that dislikes open-endings. However, I thought this movie was great. It left many things untold (such as why did they all go blind? what cured it? etc.) but that's because it didn't want you to focus on those facts. The movie wanted you to focus on the break-down of society in the hopes of preserving ones' self. The ward in which they stayed started out as an acceptable place to be, however the guards were too afraid of becoming infected to listen to these people when conditions became unbearable. It showed how not understanding how or why something is happening can lead to dehumanizing and fear. I felt that it brought up some interesting moral dilemmas, especially concerning the food for sex issue the characters encountered towards the end of the film.
I thought the directors use of blurred and dark scenes as well as accentuating white helped to understand the life these people were being forced to live. It evoked empathy for the main character and for those who became blind.
I think that it was a great look at human nature and had a few interesting scenes concerning religion.
Definitely a thought provoking and, at times, shocking film.
Blindness: Lack of Gnosis January 18, 2010
Gaby
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
The story is about an epidemic of blindness and the social breakdown that follows when people have to be quarantined in a concentration camp like scenario and is based on José Saramago's novel Essay on Blindness. It depicts the nature of our humanity giving some insights about our raison d'être and how fear, sex and hunger rules our basic drives bringing misery and chaos. It also portrays pathological people quite well, that is people without conscience nor empathy which are driven by their predatory natures in quite a different way than the rest of normal human beings.
At the beginning of the movie, when the first case of blindness appear, a doctor is brainstorming with his wife about the cause of the disease. He says that it seems to be a case of agnosia which refers to the inability to recognize people or objects even when basic sensory modalities, such as vision, are intact. The wife points out the word gnosis in agnosia and wanders if there is a relation, "lack of gnosis". This was quite interesting and appropriate considering what I was about to see in the rest of the movie. Gnosis is a greek word which means knowledge, specially about esoteric matters. The word implies experiential, lived or revealed knowledge as opposed to information acquired second hand, from books for example. Boris Mouravieff wrote about this knowledge in his book Gnosis, I'll quote here a few paragraphs:
"Homo Sapiens lives immersed in his everyday life to a point where he forgets himself and forgets where he is going; yet, without feeling it, he knows that death cuts off everything. How can we explain that the intellectual who has made marvelous discoveries and the technocrat who has exploited them have left outside the field of their investigations the ending of our lives? How can we explain that a science which attempts everything and claims everything nevertheless remains indifferent to the enigma revealed by the question of death? How can we explain why Science, instead of uniting its efforts with its older sister Religion to resolve the problem of Being - which is also the problem of death - has in fact opposed her?"
"Whether a man dies in bed or aboard an interplanetary ship, the human condition has not changed in the slightest. Happiness? But we are taught that happiness lasts only as long as the Illusion lasts... and what is this Illusion? Nobody knows. But it submerges us."
"If we only knew what Illusion is, we would then know the opposite: what Truth is. This Truth would liberate us from slavery. As a psychological phenomenon, has Illusion ever been subjected to critical analysis based on the most recent discoveries of science? It does not seem to be so, and yet one cannot say that man is lazy and does not search. He is a passionate searcher ... but he misses the essential; he bypasses it in his search. What strikes us from the very beginning is that man confuses moral progress with technical progress, so that the development of science continues in dangerous isolation. The brilliant progress that has come from technology has changed nothing essential in the human condition, and will change nothing, because it operates only in the field of everyday events. For this reason it touches the inner life of man only superficially. Yet from very ancient times it has been known that the essential is found within man, not outside him."
It was not surprising that near the end of the movie, when the doctor's wife was finally freed from her containment, she entered a church where all the main religious figures had handkerchiefs blinding their eyes. The movie is strong and quite traumatizing for its characters, so be cautioned, it might not be quite the movie for you.
 Not for the "Top Gun" fans though... November 26, 2009
N. Dunne (Cork, Ireland)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
What a great movie!
Extremely thought provoking and quite terrifying...
If you enjoyed the following movies then you'll probably get a kick out of "Blindness".
"The Happening"
"28 Days Later"
AND
"Silent Hill"
 Worst Movie Ever Bar None November 15, 2009
agnes bonaparte
0 out of 3 found this review helpful
This was easily the worst movie I have ever seen. The story and acting is laugh out loud ridiculous. The plot is a joke. I am not going to type in a long winded review of the plot. I am just warning you, this is two hours of your life you will never get back, disregard this warning at your own peril.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 66
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