The movie opens in a traffic jam with a man screaming out “I’m blind” from behind the wheel. Every driver’s nightmare. Seconds later another person, and then another, are affected by this insane epidemic of seeing only whiteness (as opposed to the blackness a blind person might experience.) Enter the Eye Doctor (Mark Ruffalo) whose wife (Julianne Moore) becomes a sort of savior for these victims. Quarantined in some hell-hole of a building, and left to degenerate as a society, we have plenty of time to ponder why the filmmaker would choose this route except that maybe it’s a poor adaptation of the book “Blindness” by a Nobel Prize winner. Maybe it got lost in translation? At least in Julianne Moore’slast end-of-the-world disaster “Children of Men” she not only dies in the first few minutes, but the characters (including Clive Owen) fight within normal society to be heard, to be recognized. The upside is the idea of examining issues that only the blind would have, but even that wears thin as the scenarios set up for the audience to eventually recognize them. I only wish I went blind so I wouldn’t have to watch this movie. One tiara
