Product Details

• Actors: Maury Chaykin, Danny Glover, Julianne Moore, Don McKellar, Sandra Oh
• Directors: Fernando Meirelles
• Format: AC-3, Color, Dolby, DVD, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
• Language: English
• Subtitles: English, Spanish
• Region: Region 1 (U.S. and Canada only. Read more about DVD formats.)
  
• Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1
• Number of discs: 1
• Rated: R (Restricted)
• Studio: MIRAMAX
• DVD Release Date: February 10, 2009
• Run Time: 120 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 2.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (81 customer reviews)
• ASIN: B001LLH8SE
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #41,517 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)
• For more information about "Blindness" visit the Internet Movie Database (IMDb)

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

BLINDNESS - DVD Movie

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

32 of 36 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Awesome movie!, October 31, 2009

By 

C. Duchesne (Quebec, Canada) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Blindness (DVD)

Wow, why does this have such a low rating on IMDB and why does so many people hate it? The only answer that I can come up with is that most of the people that hate it are teens that don't know the meaning of "plot hole". There's no plot hole in this movie. The fact that there's no explanation why people become blind is not a plot hole, it's just not an important detail. Saying that it's plot hole is just like saying that the fact there's no explanation why people become zombies in Dawn Of The Dead is a plot hole. It's not a plot hole, it's just not what the movie is about. It was intentionally not explained. Anyway, it's an awesome movie! It's not only entertaining, it's also sad, disturbing, powerful and I could go on and on and on! I'm pretty sure that it's the only movie that made me go from sad to disturbed to happy and to sad again!

Short review, I know, but I'm just not good at writting reviews. I just hope that it's atleast slightly helpful.

12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Blind Bud, July 29, 2009

By 

Vaun I. (Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Blindness (DVD)

It is easy to understand why this film received such terrible reviews. "Blindness" is a very difficult film to swallow; it's largely unpleasant, cynical and even disgusting. But is this portrayal of humanity farfetched, a sloppy exaggeration of human beings' capacity for baseness? One need only look back in history to find the answer. In short, this is not a film which you emerge from feeling "warm and squishy", although if one makes it through the end that -may- be possible.

Many of the criticisms are aimed at the lack of plot development. But this would be like calling "The Ring" a terrible movie on the basis of its inadequacy in explaining how a girl can walk out of a television set. Or claiming that "Mrs. Doubtfire" was awful because Robin Williams' accent was actually Scottish and not English. There are films that are intended to petrify and others which amuse; the purpose of "Blindness" is neither. It is not a well-defined plot which drives this movie, but rather thematic elements and experimental imagery. With that in mind the cause of and solution to this epidemic blindness, the explanation behind the Doctor's Wife's immunity and answers to similar questions become irrelevant.

The realism of this film also comes into question, when it pertains to mass hysteria. The likelihood of these particular events seems as questionable as if nearly everyone adopted a code of altruism with the knowledge that blindness is now a highly contagious epidemic with no foreseeable cure. The sudden removal of sight does not promote calm. Which doctors and scientists would offer to conduct tests on the quarantined knowing that they could very well lose their sight as well and end up joining them? On speculation, the sudden loss of sight is not something easily and quickly adapted, and certainly not in the conditions portrayed in the movie.

There was also another controversy concerning several organizations for the blind having a negative view of this film. Again, this is understandable. However, the film was not merely about blindness as a physical disability, nor was its tagline: "All Blind People Are Evil". Instead blindness was used as a device with regards to mass hysteria and, of course, as a metaphor. Blindness as an affliction was inessential.

If we restrict films to only those which leave us immediately sated with contentment, then I think we have relegated film into a mere distraction and not also as a form of art. In doing so, our mirrors become unbalanced and realities warped.

We need the bitter to taste the sweet.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Underrated and masterful, July 31, 2009

By 

One-Line Film Reviews (Easton, MD) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Blindness (DVD)

The Bottom Line:

Director Fernando Meirelles and his screenwriter Don McKellar actually improve on the source novel with this excellent and intelligent film that expertly portrays what Saramagos' "white blindness" might do to society and enlarges upon the allegorical themes of the book; inexplicably reviled by most critics and a film that some seem to find sordid, Blindness was one of the best and most thought-provoking movies of 2008.

3.5/4