{mosimage}The most international Brazilian director, Fernando Meirelles, adapts the book of Nobel Prize Jose Saramago in a polemic and mind-awaken movie.
I had a big curiosity for this movie before watching it. I loved Meirelles previous City of God, and I also had the chance to meet in person Jose Saramago when he visited Helsinki a couple of years ago, so like it or not, I had quite big expectations towards this movie.
In a sense, the idea is pretty good, and the start is promising. But really, some holes in the plot really spoil the result. I have not read the original book, but I have heard opinions that many of the plot holes of the movie are better explained in the book, and I hope that it is true, because they really make you lose concentration on the action. I know this is a parabolic story about the human beings condition and the greed that can show the best and the worst of us, but still, it does not make any sense why the character of Julianne Moore, being the only one who can see in the wards, does not use this to avoid the killing and raping of other people there. The scenes of the women being raped is certainly disturbing, and surely can hurt more than one spectator´s sensibility.
The acting of the characters is good, the cast is certainly astonishing, reuniting people like the previously mentioned Moore, Danny Glover, Gael Bernal… but in some ways, the experiment of transferring the book into a movie does not work. It turns to be boring, non-logical, and slow. People gets annoyed by the flaws in the script instead of focusing on the human inter-actions there. In my humble opinion, a bit of a disappointment.
Rating 2/5.
{mosimage}The best: Gael Bernal makes a splendid role as the King of Ward Three
The worst: so you are the only one who can see, and still you let blind men abuse you and the people around you, raping and leading to starvation? Come on…
The detail: The National Federation of the Blind seemed not to be very happy about the portrayed image of the blind people in the film.