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Blindness

And then came Blindness.

City Of God is a movie to love and The Constant Gardener is one to respect. Blindness, on the other hand, isn't even close. It is the worst kind of bad movie because not only is it bad, but its so far beneath the high expectations you almost certainly set for it that it just seems that much more disappointing. The high-concept premise of the film, the accolades lauded at its source material, the strong supporting cast (headlined by Mark Ruffalo and Julianne Moore), and the reputation that Meirelles had established for himself, all made this a movie to watch out for in 2008.

Blindness, based on the Pulitzer-prize winning novel of the same name, revolves around a pandemic where the loss of sight becomes a contagious disease. There is an exciting opening scene where we open the movie with patient zero and then watch as the disease spreads and authorities attempt to quarantine the initial outbreak in a prison-like facility. Eventually, class systems evolve in these prisons and, later, certain blind members of a particular ward force their weaker counterparts to pay for their food by selling their bodies. These scenes are graphic, disgusting, and not even plausible. I'm certain there is some type of moral allegory about what debased humans are capable of, but it's hard to take any of these lessons to heart. The evil on display seems unnatural and unnecessary even, and when hybridized with Meirelles' flashy production values, it just seems out of place.

Where Meirelles' editing and cinematography enhanced his other work, here it undermines the sobering topic onscreen. In his other two outings, Meirelles used his keen visual eye to bring great life to stories that could have been too depressing to sludge through otherwise. In Blindness, he exhibits creative camera play – he uses many shots of overexposure in an attempt to mimic the milky blindness that afflicts the film's characters – but, no amount of camera gimmickry could save viewers from what is a poorly adapted, slow, depressing, and generally wrongly-conceived/executed sci-fi drama (*insert witty quip about wanting to go blind by the end of the film here*).

Trading out Focus for Miramax, Blindness kept a similar release strategy to Constant Gardener. Released in an undersized 1,690 theaters in early October, Blindness never had a chance. Perhaps with their other senses heightened, audiences smelled a miss with this one, as the movie opened to a paltry $1.9 million and dropped like a rock by 75% the following weekend, topping out with an impressively small $3.4 million domestically. Even its $16.4 million from foreign territories wouldn't be enough to help it climb over its low $25 million budget. Both critically and commercially, Meirelles officially experienced his first outright bomb.

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