This year has been an especially poor one for the adapted screenplay, everything from Snow Angels to The Dark Knight to Body of Lies to The Duchess, these are all films where the major thing wrong with the films and source of most of their problems is the screenplay. In adapting the international bestseller by José Saramago, Fernando Meirelles' film Blindness may be the worst offender of the bunch.
And offensive really is the term, it's such a poor screenplay on every level. The characterisation is absolutely non-existant, we know nothing about what drives any of these people and the little we do know is severely tested by where they take the "story". As a drama, it just doesn't work. The basic plot is that everyone goes blind apart from Julianne Moore (rather lazily reminiscent of Children of Men - nobody can get pregnant, okay I can roll with that, *ohwaitthisgirlcan* ... how?) but then the things that happen when they are confined are just eye-rollingly simplistic and predictable.
Equally, there is an incredible amount of unexplained stuff not only in the overall plot set-up, but one character has a gun - how? We don't know. One group of people control the food rations. How? Why? These are just a few of countless examples, the writers don't condescend to explain a thing, it's either the height of sloppiness or arrogance on the part of the filmmakers. This is an absolute mess of a screenplay in terms of dramatic arcs (the end is simultaneously a ridiculous conceit and also the only way they could have gone after the story they'd been telling), characterisation (oh that there were any, motivation is questionable throughout), plotting, the lot, it's simply appalling. This is all before the lazy voiceover from a minor character which appears out of nowhere halfway through the film and then disappears until the very end as well. Such an atrocious piece of writing.
In the midst of all this is Julianne Moore and she is the only reason to see the film. She is always able to bring an incredible amount of believable emotion to any role she plays and it's really needed here because she adds some humanity to a very soulless film. The editing is ponderous and makes the film drag, the score adds a tone which is very strange and doesn't suit the story at all, it's just a shoddy effort on almost every front. They even manage to make Gael García Bernal completely uninteresting and that is in itself an achievement as I've seen him in over half a dozen films and he's never been short of "very good" before. If you love Julianne, you'll force yourself to sit through this, if you don't I can't imagine any reason to even wait for this on dvd let alone pay to see it in a cinema.