DVD: "Blindness" - I just can't see it

I'm still shaking a little after watching an hour and fifteen minutes of new-to-DVD Blindness. The movie isn't that short: I couldn't finish it, as I was so furious and emotional that it was either turn it off or scream.

The first 45 minutes are intriguing: a plague of mysterious blindness sweeps an ambiguous Western city and a quarantine is enacted. Amid the blind, a seemingly immune and seeing Julian Moore hops into the quarantine bus with her afflicted husband and becomes the ace-in-the-hole for the otherwise ignored and detestable quarantine facility.

After the wards fill to capacity, a rogue blind man takes over by threatening brute force and ignoring civility, much as someone would in such a situation. But he's blind. Umm...not like Moore. He steals the food, extorts everything of value from the other wards, and what does Moore's character do? Nothing. He lets the "rebelling" wards go hungry, and what does she do? Nothing.

When this self-proclaimed king - a scrawny guy who is just as blind as all others, save for Moore - demands that women be brought to him and his cronies in exchange for food, Moore finally does something...she leads the women of her ward to get raped - herself among them. I did forget to mention that he had a six-shooter. Yeah, the b-l-i-n-d guy.

This is where I stopped watching. I don't care if - two minutes later - she kills the guy and his cohorts. I don't care if she pulls off some master plan to lead him into a hail of gunfire waiting outside the quarantine. The fact is, that the failure of Moore's character as a human being is so morally repugnant to me, that I simply could not endure it long enough to finish the film.

It was Edmund Burke who said: "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." I guess that applies to women as well.

I know what the film is trying to say, and I realize that film often builds in a crescendo so that the climax is that much more of a release from the tension. But if Moore is supposed to come across as meek and cowardly - as she would have to be to fail so badly in protecting those people - then this needed to be established earlier, say, by making her a staunch pacifist, agoraphobic, a friggin' Quaker - anything to justify such blatant disregard for life.

I welcome other insights. Opinions from someone who perhaps had the ability to finish the film and feels differently. All I know is that I could be deaf, dumb, and blind and still put up more of a fight than the fearful and sheepish masses of Blindness, let alone of seeing, capable, and yet totally impotent Moore.

Check out the Podcast of this review.