The movie I watched was actually taken with a very loyal mind to original José Saramago's book. When we look at the lower IMDb score that movie have taken, we realize that it is not often overlooked that this film deserved by the viewer. Sad but we are not surprised. Because it's a literary adaptation. Blindness is not suitable for young minds waiting for the story of post-civilization apocalyptic worlds like 'Mad Max' 'Waterworld' and 'God of Flies'. This is not the action that this generation expects, but the dark desperate world that goes bumpy in the feces is something beyond the comfort standards even for young people. I advice people to read the book first and than watch Julianne Moore acting.

Blindness (2008), directed by Fernando Meirelles, is an adaptation of José Saramago's novel Ensaio Sobre a Cegueira that tells the story of a society that falls victim to a sudden surge of blindness. The film is an extraordinary adaptation. It pictures a lot of the details of the book, such as places and scenes that are fundamental to the plot.The where and when the story happens is not mentioned and to express this idea in the film the director made a great choice by mixing elements of various nationalities. The language used is English, but the license plates look similar to Brazilian plates, the images of the city are taken from cities from different countries and the cast is really diverse. Also, none of the characters has a name, and fortunately this wasn't modified in the movie. As a great fan of the novel, these were the first details that I was expecting to see because they create the perfect atmosphere to the plot. Speaking of plot, just a few things were changed and it didn't bring any harm to the original story. While I was watching, I started to remember certain scenes from the novel and I was trying to imagine how these scenes would be portrayed in the film. I wasn't disappointed at all. Of course some parts were left out, but it wasn't a great loss, they were well adapted to be shorter than the novel. I've seen some negative reviews talking about how the film can cause a bad feeling to the audience, but I can't see how this is a bad thing, because that is exactly the purpose of the whole story. It is to cause discomfort, to show the reality we could live. The graphic scenes can be too strong to the more sensitive but they were unavoidable. All I can say is that Blindness is a well made adaptation that doesn't disappoint those who read the novel. The direction is brilliant, the actors are great and the story is told in full. Even if you didn't read the novel, it is a great way to meet José Saramago's brilliant work.

We've already had disaster movies about ice age, nuclear war, large space rocks plopping on our dumb collective heads, zombies, virus plagues, killer bunnies, killer bees and many more. So perhaps it was time to lend a comical twist to this genre with some slapstick. What can bring more mass slapstick than everyone turning blind?But - this isn't a comedy. This is for real. That blind guy BLACKMAILING blind women to sleep with him and his blind gang (he has a gang???) was NOT intended to be funny. I don't understand how, but it was intended to be powerful, thrilling, moving drama. It moved me alright: I blew snot out of my nose watching blind men sexually harass blind women. I don't think I've seen anything quite as inane as a blind man waving around with a gun threatening to kill people. (I know, it sounds even funnier on paper, but trust me, seeing it is the real deal.) Shouldn't Eddie Murphy be doing that in a cheesy comedy?So let me get this right: a group of blind men act as thugs by holding all the other blind people hostage to their silly demands (which includes money and wrist-watches - utterly worthless items in that environment). Why wasn't this on Monty Python, frcrissakes. I bet Palin and Cleese were smashing their left-wing heads against the walls, wondering "how come we didn't think of this?!" No, I am not talking about another Python sketch. I'm talking about a fourth Python movie! Julianne Moore – very conveniently – sneaks into the quarantine facility, acting as the eyes of the group. Does she ever for a second consider how EASY-PEASY it would be to snatch a gun from a blind man? She could have prevented that entire sex-gang segment from turning this into another "Battlefield Earth", just by taking his gun away. But it didn't suit the writers' intentions. That's a classic case of an incompetent writer relentlessly pushing a moronic plot-device just so the story moves come-hell-or-high-water into the desired direction.I just wonder why the writer-fool didn't milk the blind-gang shtick to its full potential. The entire movie could have been about that. For example, what if leader thug decided that all the others had to perform a play for his gang? Wouldn't that have been just as funny? What if he decided that the women had to form a girl-power pop-group, complete with sexy dance moves? (Yes, the blind wouldn't be able to see the dancing, but since when is this movie concerned with trifles such as logic and common sense?)The more intelligent movie-goers (you know… the non-hipster ones) complain about the extremely stupid dialogue and the flat, lethargic acting. They have every right to complain, because the conversations are generally imbecilic, and the performances just plain lazy. Julianne Moore has a perpetual moronic grin that makes her looked stoned. She's the Mother Teresa of the movie, and she hams it up as only she knows how to. Admittedly, Meryl Streep would have been far worse, hamming it up with a badly done bizarre accent, no doubt. (As for Mother Teresa, that's just an expression. You didn't seriously think that I consider her a saintly person? The woman was a greedy, lying, two-faced, evil witch assigned the phony image of a Nightingale by those pedos from Vatican, with generous help from the lobotomized international zombie press.)Moore is so sickeningly understanding and so Hollywoodly compassionate that she doesn't even get too offended when her husband cheats on her with another woman. In a PROPER comedy (as opposed to an unintentional one) Moore would have slapped him around, him not being able to defend himself and that would have been both realistic and hilarious; a win-win situation: all bloodied and embarrassed (for being beaten up by his tiny wife who also wipes his hinder), he could have said something like "oh come on, honey, give a guy a break! I'm blind, she's blind, we're so miserable, can't you just continue feeling sorry for us and let us get on with the in-out?" Oh the fun I'd have re-writing this stupid script.The movie improves a lot (which isn't saying much) once the blind group breaks out of its silly prison camp and ventures outside. There are some nice post-apocalyptic scenes of garbage and chaos, and that's what the movie should have been about, instead of putting us through the torture of watching these clowns fumble about for an hour in some exaggerated Nazi camp. That's the wrong type of garbage and chaos.Speaking of which, I don't know what flaming Marxist wrote the novel this drivel is based on, but he must suffer from severe paranoia if he actually believes that any government – in a functioning, wealthy democracy – would treat a bunch of infected mystery patients like utter garbage. Jesus wept, if the gov't were so vicious, wouldn't the prisons be run like concentration camps? Wouldn't the media experience extreme Putin-like censorship? Set this idiocy in Putin's Russia or that round-headed mongrel's North Korea and it would at least make some sense, but the notion that the blind would simply be segregated – and then basically left to fend for themselves (!) in the States or Canada is asinine, bizarre and very much the result of a deluded left-winger's psychotic episodes no doubt brought about by an excessive intake of Bolivian mushrooms and numerous viewings of Michael Moore's propaganda "documentaries". Whoever wrote this garbage should get the anti-Nobel Prize for Anti-Literature. This premise is dumber than Philip K. Dick's "Counter-Clock World".

Okay, I admit it. I watched this movie twice, but only because I had read the book. The first time watched it I just switch on the subtitles and played the movie at x4 speed, as I can read fairly fast. Even then it was slow and boring, but for some reason I felt I had missed something and did not get the full effect of the film. So I watched it a second time with a friend, at normal speed, and I realised what I missed was a torturous 2 hours where I could have been doing something else. The film was simply terrible. At least at x4 speed it is over in 30 minutes, but at 2 hours the agony is simply prolonged. I wished I had read the reviews here first. I might have avoided this train wreck. The sad part is it is not that much different from the book, which I always had an issue with. I felt it was written from one man's very limited perspective on humanity and his complete lack of understanding of actual blindness. Blind people do not behave like retarded farm animals, and a caring wife would not so easily allow herself to get raped for food. It just goes to show the writers imagination is quite limited, if he thinks people behave in such a way. It also shows he has little life experience, which is strongly reflected in the film. Simply put; this film is neither realistic nor is anything in it believable. Things happen very randomly and the characters are simply cardboard cutouts. I would avoid this film at all costs, unless you enjoy 2 hours of torture. If you insist on watching it, maybe do what I did the first time and play it at x4 speed. It is actually bearable that way.