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More proof that it's all in the execution: if someone told you a new movie's storyline was like Day Of The Triffids meets Doomsday, you might expect a crazy schlockfest of rubber monsters and kilt-flapping car chases. But then if you throw in that it stars Julianne Moore and Mark Ruffalo, is based on a novel by a Nobel Prize-winning author and is done in the style of Children Of Men, suddenly the picture changes a bit. Spoilers ahead!
More proof that it's all in the execution: if someone told you a new movie's storyline was like Day Of The Triffids meets Doomsday, you might expect a crazy schlockfest of rubber monsters and kilt-flapping car chases. But then if you throw in that it stars Julianne Moore and Mark Ruffalo, is based on a novel by a Nobel Prize-winning author and is done in the style of Children Of Men, suddenly the picture changes a bit. Spoilers ahead!Blindness is based on a novel by Jose Saramago, who also wrote The Gospel According to Jesus Christ and Baltasar and Blimunda. Like Triffids, it deals with a mysterious plague of blindness that leaves almost everyone in a city unable to see. And like Triffids, it shows society breaking down and people descending into barbaric squalor in fairly short order. Unlike Triffids, however, the blind people still keep a lot of their humanity.
In the novel, all of the blind people are quarantined in an asylum where they live in squalor, until the soldiers guarding them go blind as well. But it looks like the movie will take a leaf from Doomsday's book and actually quarantine the entire city, walling it off to keep the infection from spreading.
Besides Moore, the film stars Mark Ruffalo as Moore's blind husband, a doctor, Danny Glover as the man with the black eyepatch, and Sandra Oh as the Minister of Health who seals off the city. (Yay, Sandra Oh!) It's directed by the Oscar-nominated Fernando Meirelles, who directed City Of God and The Constant Gardener.
Let's hope that this film does well enough that Meirelles, or someone, gets to film the sequel, which is even weirder. In Seeing, it's a few years later, and everyone's almost forgotten that nasty plague of blindness. Until the city holds an election, and almost all of the ballots turn up blank. Everybody decides to blame Julianne Moore's character, because she kept her sight during the plague. The literal blindness finally makes its transition into being figurative political blindness.
Comments
This looks awesome creepy. Danny Glover FTW!
God I hope this is good. Saramago is one of my favorite authors, and although Blindness is a little bit of a departure from his other works, it's also his greatest novel (and I use "greatest" because it's truly one of the three or four best novels I've read in the last 10 years.)
Honestly, I have a little bit of a hard time imagining Moore and Ruffalo in these roles (the characters struck me as being much older.) But at least they are both good enough actors to pull it off.
Seeing didn't blow my socks off the same way, but probably lends itself even better to being a good movie, so I also hope this does well enough to allow for the sequel. Plus, I just hope it does well enough to do any justice to the book.
Seriously, if you haven't read Blindness, read it.
Sigh.
Spoiler.
As usual.
...okay, I just watched the trailer...sadly skeptical.
What is so wonderful about the book is that Saramago's style of writing really puts you in this world of being blind, it's so personal. The movie looks good, but very much like a generally SF movie.
...unsure.
@Plague: Isn't that why you come here?
It's not Triffids + Doomsday without Goth punks, cars crashing through busses, and giant killer plants.
I wonder if any blind people would be offended by this, or if they're all down to Earth enough that they could appreciate the use of their disability as a plot device.
Deaf people would probably riot in the streets.
I'm loathe to lend any credibiity to Deaf culture (you know, those who insist on the capital D), but in this day and age, disabilities like deafness are seen by some as the center of an identity construct.
Wouldn't want to offend a whole swath of the population, now.
I'll have to look into the novels, never heard of the author. If this were a completely original Hollywood concept (as if), I'd wonder why they didn't pick melanin levels instead of blindness.
A contagious disease that makes you super dark or lose all your melanin (uber vitiligo) would be a cool basis for an SF cultural critique.
Fernando Meirelles is one of the best directors working today. Julianne Moore is one of the best actresses working today. Mark Rufalo is one of the best... ummm, he's got indie cred! But seriously folks, isn't this the kind of Sci-fi that we want; great directing, great acting and great story. This is obviously following in the footsteps of Children of Men and hopefully more Sci-Fi movies will follow this example rather than the explosions and special effects example.
@Ma1agate:
I smell fire, run!
@BullfightsOnAcid: I love me some effects and 'splosions, but yes, it is exactly the kind we want.
@92BuickLeSabre: I haven't read the book and I believe what you say about the writing style, but as for capturing a personal experience I felt I had lived in a favela after seeing City of God, so I'll give this the benefit of the doubt.
@Ma1agate:
Well, it's not like blind people are going to see it.
(oh come on, that was right there)
@shudderstep: Yeah, I was trying to be respectful. Which is why I let someone else say it.
@Seth L: I'll admit I've known too many (for lack of a better term) militant Deaf people. I'm talking about the ones that want to assure all their kids are deaf, that kind of thing. They see deafness as a cultural identity, not as a challenge to overcome in existing in our society. But hey, that's their choice.
But as far as I know there isn't a Blind(see what I did there?) analog to that group. Hence the comment.
@Ma1agate: I doubt it. Here, the blindness is artificial, caused by a virus on a massive scale. It's not like being born blind or losing your sight through something like retinitis pigmentosa. It's really a convention for telling the story.
@Ma1agate:
I know exactly what you're talking about, I was just being snarky, and pointing out that those are the kinds of things that start flamewars.
I read half of the book. Great premise, interesting ideas, but it read more like philosophy than fiction. But apparently part of the book is just a bad translation from the original Portuguese. Apparently, it gets better in the second half, but the part I read was just very hamfisted.
Still, the premise was interesting enough that I might finish it someday.
@Garrison Dean: Excellent point. City of God and the accompanying documentary were about as effective as movies can be.
I'm looking forward to a post-apocslyptic wasteland filled with blind people. Especially when they get their hands on those cool razor-edged boomerangs.
@Grey_Area: Hrmmm interesting. Blindness would account for the clothing and haircuts in many post-apocalyptic films.
Who would have thought that Julianne Moore would become the It Girl of intelligent SF cinema?!!
AFAIK, the difference between deafness and other disabilities, IMO, deals with language. Since someone born deaf has difficulty using spoken language, they often grow up using a signed language -- and that linguistic identity adds to their identity and, combined with specialized Deaf schools, to form a unique subculture.
I'm going to stop there. Most of what I know about Deaf culture is pretty academic. Unfortunately, I haven't had any personal experience with Deaf people -- though I wish I did, as being a huge language geek I'd be very interesting and learning and using ASL. Just a fluke of my environment I guess.
who is going to tell danny glover that his new dentures give him a lisp?
This was produced by a friend of mine and filmed in São Paulo. I watched a lot of the exterior shots. I'm interested to see how the movie turns out.
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