Blindness (2008)

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General		Extras
Category	Drama	Main Menu Audio & Animation Deleted Scenes Featurette-Making Of
Rating
Year Of Production	2008
Running Time	116:10
RSDL / Flipper	RSDL (76:37)	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Ads Then Menu
Region Coding	4	Directed By	Fernando Meirelles
Studio Distributor	Roadshow Home Entertainment	Starring	Yusuke Iseya Jason Bermingham Eduardo Semerjian Don McKellar Ciça Meirelles Antônio Fragoso Lilian Blanc Douglas Silva Daniel Zettel Yoshino Kimura Joe Pingue
Case	Amaray Variant
RPI	$39.95	Music	Marco Antônio Guimarães

Video		Audio
Pan & Scan/Full Frame	None	English Dolby Digital 5.1 (448Kb/s) English Descriptive Audio Dolby Digital 2.0 (224Kb/s)
Widescreen Aspect Ratio	1.85:1
16x9 Enhancement
Video Format	576i (PAL)
Original Aspect Ratio	1.85:1	Miscellaneous
Jacket Pictures	No
Subtitles	English for the Hearing Impaired	Smoking	Yes
		Annoying Product Placement	No
		Action In or After Credits	No

    Director Fernando Meirelles had a heavy weight of expectation hanging over his next feature after the cult success of City of God and the critical and commercial success The Constant Gardener. His choice to adapt a cult novel, Blindness, by Nobel Prize winning Portuguese author José Saramago only added to that weight. The film premiered as the opening film to the 2008 Cannes Film Festival amid much fanfare, but its reception was decidedly mixed and the substantial anticipation the film had generated among cinephiles around the world dried up in an instant. Its US theatrical release underperformed to an embarrassing extent. Australia had to wait nearly a full year from the Cannes premiere for a blink-and-you'll-miss-it theatrical run. Now, only a couple of months on, we have it on DVD.

    The story follows a group of people struggling to survive through an epidemic of "white blindness", a communicable disease that makes sufferers see nothing but a field of white, in a fictional, right-wing, society. The first few infectees are bundled into quarantine camps where they are left to manage themselves, leading to a Lord of the Flies like environment. Among the early victims are an eye doctor (Mark Ruffalo), his seemingly immune wife who pretends to be affected so she can look after her husband (Julianne Moore), a high-class call girl (Alice Braga), a kind old man (Danny Glover), the first victim (Yusuke Iseya), his wife (Yoshino Kimura) and a little kid. Soon after arrives a nasty man (Gael Garcia Bernal) who bands together with other thugs to control the camp's food supply. None of the characters given an actual name, leaving them to live, die and be described by the stereotype that best fits.

    As well as fighting amongst themselves, groups of the detainees make earnest efforts of escaping and eventually the story moves on to a view of the apocalyptic chaos the world has descended to amidst the epidemic.

    Blindness suffers significantly from trying to cover too much story and too many themes in too little screen time. The worst casualty of this over-ambition is the characterisations afforded to every one of the players. The only character who gets any meat at all is Julianne Moore's, though barely so even with her appearing on-screen in virtually every part of the film beyond the initial introductory sequence. The other characters are little more than tired stereotypes, which is thankful to an extent as viewers can probably guess the motivations that the film should portray them with. Unfortunately this doesn't help the fact that we never get to know them well enough to care what happens to them.

    The story, its structure and themes borrow heavily from George Romero's Dead movies, particularly Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead, albeit without the zombies. Whilst this sounds like a big caveat, it really isn't. Swapping one apocalyptic plague for another, both deal with the same sort of isolation issues and factional behaviour. Both explore similar anti-commercial and anti-materialism themes. Both predict very similar decays of society and share a similar cynical view of the human condition. Blindness even follows a very similar story structure to Dawn of the Dead, although the plotting is much choppier in this instance (which itself says quite a lot).

    Meirelles tries awfully hard to make Blindness look arty and unusual. So hard, in fact, that the look of the film quickly becomes annoying. Awkward angles, odd focal effects, shots focussed on pointless inanimate objects rather than the film's subjects, unexpected jumpy cuts. It is almost like a film-school nightmare. The only thing missing is a cheesy post-grunge rock soundtrack. What an unfortunate step backwards for a promising director.

    There are some very good bits in Blindness. Nowhere near enough to make up for its countless faults, but certainly enough to make for an interesting watch and spark a degree of debate among viewers. Chalk this one up as a mildly interesting failure.

Video

    The movie is presented in its original 1.85:1 aspect ratio.

    The video generally looks quite good. The image is reasonably sharp and clear, featuring only a mild level of film grain. The film features a deliberately pale and washed out colour palette, which is represented quite well by the video. There is a good level of shadow detail.

    There are no noticeable compression artefacts or film artefacts in the video.

    The film features English subtitles for the hearing impaired. These are reasonably accurate to the spoken word and timed imperfectly, but reasonably.

    Whilst the bulk of the film is in English, some parts of Blindness feature Japanese dialogue. Whilst this dialogue was translated in the theatrical release and is translated on the track of English subtitles for the hearing impaired, along with extra hearing impaired cues, there are no subtitles available that only translate the Japanese audio. Viewers that do not understand English and Japanese will have to either watch with the hearing-impaired subtitles on throughout the whole movie or actively turn the subtitles on and off throughout the movie to understand what is going on. The distributor (Roadshow) have been contacted for comment but have not as yet communicated their plans with regard to this issue. We will keep you informed.

    This is an RSDL disc, however the layer change was not noticeable.

Video Ratings Summary

Sharpness
Shadow Detail
Colour
Grain/Pixelization
Film-To-Video Artefacts
Film Artefacts
Overall

Audio

    The film features an English/Japanese Dolby Digital 5.1 (448Kbps) audio track.

    The dialogue is reasonably clear and easy to discern, however it interchanges between English and Japanese with no separate subtitles for the Japanese bits.

    The film features music by experimental Brazilian percussive band Uakti. This unusual world-music adds a slightly unnerving spirit to the film, and is certainly one of its highlights.

    The surrounds are put to fair use throughout the film, but not the great use that the subject matter could have afforded. The very percussive score makes the best use of the sound field. The LFE channel is used fairly subtly and to very good effect.

Audio Ratings Summary

Dialogue
Audio Sync
Clicks/Pops/Dropouts
Surround Channel Use
Subwoofer
Overall

    Eventually, the disc opens to a stylish animated menu featuring background audio, but only after an annoying anti-piracy clip and 7:26 minutes of trailers which cannot be skipped.

Making Of Featurette (55:10)

    A particularly comprehensive "making of" featurette. This featurette is quite an interesting watch, but a little overlong and occasionally a tad pretentious.

Deleted Scenes

    A handful of deleted scenes, each preceded by a short text description explaining where in the film the scene belongs and why it was removed. A good way of presenting the scenes, and a number of the scenes make parts of the movie (particularly late parts of the movie) make more sense.

    The Australian Region 4 edition is identical to the US Region 1 edition, save for PAL/NTSC differences, a Spanish subtitle track and an English subtitle track that translates only the Japanese dialogue in the film (which alone makes it a better buy than the flawed Region 4 edition).

    The version of choice internationally appears to be the Brazilian Region 4 edition, which features the same features as the Australian edition as well as correct subtitling, a host of additional language options and an additional 12 minute featurette about the film's unusual score.

    An interesting art-film drama that buckles under the weight of its own ambition. A strong performance from Julianne Moore anchors the film and itself is enough to justify giving Blindness a chance.

    The disc generally features a decent technical presentation - save for a show-stopping subtitling issue, which I have reflected in the video score - and solid extras.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall