BLINDNESS will make you see the world anew!

An adaptation of nobel-prize winning author José Saramago's novel of the same name, BLINDNESS can (although most likely won't) be described as a disaster movie with a difference. One day a young Japanese man is struck blind whilst driving. Unlike traditional blindness, however, it is experienced as white, shifting shapes: an all-enveloping fog rather than just sheer black. When he gets medical attention the doctor is baffled, but worse than this he is infected. Soon the disease spreads and the first wave of the infected are quarantined. It is the plight of these initial groups that the film follows within the grim confines of abandoned mental hospital to which they are banished. I call it a disaster movie because it follows the same format of following individual plight in a moment of mass hysteria, using the events befalling mankind as an allegory for the great problems in the world. The reason it is different is because it's not another lame over-funded and dumbed down bilge that we've seen in the likes of THE HAPPENING, but nor is it quite the exciting roller coaster ride of 28 DAYS LATER. What it is though, is an intense, powerful and visually stunning voyage through the depths of society's problems. A conclusion I'm sure José Saramago would be more than happy with. Aside from Don McKellar's wonderful job on the script, the real heart of this film comes in the utterly amazing work depicting the experience of blindness. Director Fernando Meirelles has already more than proved his ability in creating vivid worlds and playing with visuals to great effect in works such as Oscar-nominated CITY OF GOD, but here he really raised the bar. The sound design captured the hectic world we live in, and went worlds towards conveying the frightening chaos of noise that engulfs us without the aid of sight. His swimming cloudy worlds of the blind are a marvel of mixed light and modified focus. But most of all, the contrastingly crisp view of what a world inhabited by the blind would look like to those with sight is a triumph of disorder and squalor that viscerally drags the viewer into those dark depths we are plunged into by the plot. Hopefully the presence of Danny Glover and Julianne Moore will draw some attention to this movie, because once the bums are on seats I'm certain it'll be hard not to be blown away by Meirelles' visuals and the superb performances put in by the cast, among whom Moore herself, Gael Garcia Bernal (THE SCIENCE OF SLEEP, THE MOTORCYCLE DIARIES) and Alice Braga excelled. Give this one a go guys, you'll see the world anew.