Blindness (2008)
Directed by Fernando Meirelles
When a sudden plague of blindness devastates a city, a small group of the afflicted band together to triumphantly overcome the horrific conditions of their imposed quarantine.
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What critics compared Blindness to
Children of Men did it with infertility.
Julianne Moore (2006's " Children of Men ") is remarkable, sometimes a one-woman show in the way that she stands apart from the others and tries with all her might to keep a brave face.
Like 2006's Children of Men, the story functions within a palpable reality, but unlike that superior film, its message is emphasized over that story rather than the other way around.
But compared with more successful examples, such as "Children of Men," "28 Days Later" and even the spotty "I Am Legend" (which also featured Braga as a mother-surrogate leading an orphaned boy through the apocalypse), "Blindness" feels stilted, claustrophobic and more stylish than substantial.
Itâs an adaptation of the 1995 novel by Nobel Prize winner José Saramago, and at first blush it seems to fall into the same mold as Children of Men: a serious film that uses the sci-fi premise of a near-future dystopia to comment on the modern-day dystopia already upon us.
At least, that’s what should be frightening about the “Bird Box” premise, which author Josh Malerman hatched in novel form, where readers’ imaginations were free to fill in that unseen terror as they saw fit — a device that he may as well have lifted from Stephen King’s “The Mist” or José Saramago’s “Blindness.”
“Don’t Breathe” recalls Fernando Meirelles’ 2008 film “Blindness,” in which a city’s residents are suddenly struck by an epidemic of blindness and are quarantined in a psychiatric institution.
And while it involves a mysterious pandemic just as Alfonso Cuarón’s “Children of Men” and Fernando Meirelles ’s “Blindness” did, “Contagion” doesn’t offer similar commentaries on the eclipse of humanity.
But even more recently, we had Julianne Moore in Blindness where the inability to see could be passed along like a viral plague.
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This fable about an epidemic of "white blindness" from the gritty Brazilian Fernando Meirelles looks and feels like an "I Am Legend" for grown-ups.
But compared with more successful examples, such as "Children of Men," "28 Days Later" and even the spotty "I Am Legend" (which also featured Braga as a mother-surrogate leading an orphaned boy through the apocalypse), "Blindness" feels stilted, claustrophobic and more stylish than substantial.