Blindness

Julianne Moore stars in this odd movie, about blindess mysteriously sweeping the planet. The victims just see white but their eyes appear normal and the medical community can not explain it.

Mark Ruffalo is also in the movie, he plays an opomologist who falls victim to this strange disease right at the outset. He performed impressively in the well laid out Zodiac movie.

Danny Glover has a small role in this movie. This movie has a strange twist, most of the movie takes place in a disgusting prison with three wards and one ward begins to hoard the food, only trading it for the jewelry. Ruffalo is a wimp doctor who falls for this ploy, after the jewelry is gone from the two other ward, the bully ward which has a gun and is run by a sadistic dictator, then demands the other two wards offer their woman for the food. The story Animal Farm or 1984 comes to mind but this story is much more fantastical. The science on how this disease operates goes down the drain. The outside world is not shown, this movie is just difficult to watch. The depravity of mankind is shown, or the wimpiness of it.

Julianne Moore can see throughout the movie and she choses to live and reside in this hell hole. Her husband is Ruffalo and she loves him so much she chooses to remain and take care of him. After about three days, he detests this since she is more of his mother or nurse. Why she just does not sneak over to the ward and sneak some food out is beyond me. She can see, the only one in there who can see, she chooses not take advantage of this. If one thinks Children of Men is hard to watch, this movie makes that seem like Rocky 4, Predator, or Shawshank Redemption.

When they fight back, a fire breaks out, and they have to escape. Julianne pleads to the guards for help. In doing so, she pushes open the door and opens the large fence. Before, she would have been shot for doing this or trying to. She walks outside the compound and realizes they are free, no one is watching over them. They walk outside and the outside city is in disaray. Trash everywhere, society has broken down. About 1/3rd into the movie, Glover's character explains to Ruffalo's ward that there were plane, car, and truck crashes, people just stopped driving any where. Which does not make sense since if one can see, then drive. Just drive slowly since apparently one can become blind in about 15 seconds or so.

About half way through the movie, Moore's character fights back by killing their leader who has already raped her. Ofcourse he deserved to die about five minutes after he began speaking, especially after he declared himself the self proclaimed ruler of this ad hoc institution.

The movie ends with Moore taking her husband and some followers to their home by walking across town holding hands or a rope. By this point, many have died but falling down stairs or off ledges, starvation, or lack of water, what not. All of a sudden, one of the main characters, an Asian guy, regains his sight just as strangely as he lost it during the inception of the movie. The point of this movie is that our sight is important. This is as obvious as 2 x 3 = 6.

I would allocate this movie 1 star out of five. *

Glad this movie did not have the environmenalist theme thrust down our throat like M. Night Shyamalan's did to us with the The Happening, earlier this year. That entire central premise is based on wicked lies, Al Gore innuendo, and fabricated statistics. One bright aspect of this film. But this movie is not worth watching, I would not recommend it to anyone. Street Kings is worth watching for the third time before this movie is ever watched for the first time.