Jamesst

I think really the fact that it failed to be something profundity and inspiration like it so desperately wanted to be and that it had the casting, writing and directing to be more than it was meant that it attracted bad press as a response to it's disappointment. But leaving this aside, it was very moving at times, heart-rending and disgusting much of the time and very potent and powerful. The film rates highly by my verdict but how I arrive at this is as confusing and uneven as the film tends to be. Basically the concept and the emotional intensity of the subject matter and the horrible atrocities portrayed on screen are enough to allow this film to persevere beyond myriad annoyances.

It is one of those films with often contrived behaviour on the part of the characters and MANY moments where you find yourself talking to the screen asking "why would...?" and "but wouldn't they...?" and a lot of those questions SHOULD be answered allegory or metaphor aside, much of the film leaves things intentionally unanswered or unaccounted for that it should not have and it's irritating. Like with many end of days, societal breakdown films, you invest a lot of yourself and project a lot of what you believe you would do in that situation on to the characters and this is good, with minimal effort any film of this ilk can immerse an audience very effectively right from the start because people love post-apocalyptic tales, they want to know how they would react and in those same circumstances and they love to identify with the voice most like theirs in the film. This is one area where Blindness has failed to provide, there are few if any dissenting voices to the decisions of the principal characters and they are given no real exploration or insight and as I've said, to me a lot of it seems contrived and frankly not what I think I, nor anyone would do, half the time. Certainly it's a film and you can't judge it by how closely the characters' decisions matched what you believe yours would have been but so much of the time they seem like they are in active defiance of them that it seems confusing and obfuscating.

Ignoring that frustration you're left to suspend disbelief and simply take it that this is how the characters ARE behaving like it or not and you've got a good film still there to be had but then it continually forgets what sort of a film it is or what it's for. It makes its allegorical purpose and symbolism very obvious but only in so far as you can see that this the intention not what exactly the symbols and metaphor say exactly and then the greatest sin of all the thing that almost (but I stress almost) ruined the whole film, the occasional interlude by a narrator, a kindly old man with wisdom belying his meek and unobtrusive presence this simply tears away the mood and the immersion, it occurs only infrequently and never with anything particularly insightful, there's an initial attempt to weave his exposition into the on screen world but this is abandoned fairly quickly, the character himself needn't even be there and as a narrator well that was just a cruel thing to do to a film, I'll never understand why that was there.

But all this complaint ties back to my observation that the film somehow finds a way, it is still good, it is still powerful and worth watching and the thing is I can't really explain why. I can only reiterate that it's just a story that is intrinsically human, one that never expires or fails to capture the imagination, like all allegories of the human condition that tear down the boundaries of the status-quo of society, it allows our imaginations to explore humanity both it's darkest depths to it's never faltering endurance.

I hesitated on giving this title a rating quite so low as this given that it did entertain and I thought perhaps it could gain some points for being so awful that it was good but really I can't truthfully say that it was good in any way. It was able to keep me watching whilst suffering from insomnia and with nothing else on TV a 2 am but I don't think that's a great claim to fame, I guess the hook - the watch-ability factor - for this title comes from trying to see if it really is serious. Of course one figures out after about 45 minutes that this obviously really is the plot and look they were going for, and there really isn't going to be a great comedic reveal; but somehow you just can't shake the feeling it's supposed to some sort of post-modern reflexive irony or something. I found myself eagerly watching every minute to see when the real movie would begin. In case you hadn't guessed from the review's tone, that moment never came.

Given how poorly detailed the plot synopsis is, and the fact that everywhere else on the internet everyone has merely copy and pasted the same similar synopsis, you'll have trouble figuring out what this is about but don't worry because if you actually did watch this you still wouldn't know. There is a quiet sense of awe with this film, a kind of confusion and bewilderment, you just can't quite believe that someone actually WROTE this, or that everyone who starred in it, must have read at least some of it to know their lines, or that a producer read it and thought it would be a good idea, and not only that, but actually got as far as filming it, acting it out, hiring crew and spending 10 MILLION DOLLARS?!?!? I mean how could such serious, pre-meditated and prolonged insanity occur in the minds of so many people simultaneously? It's a bit like some kind of mass hysteria that lasted for the entire length of the production process, were they held at gun point or something? The only idea that makes sense to me as to how this 'mess' could, somehow accidentally, materialise is that one day, ONE guy sat down and watched as many episodes of days of our lives, and the young and the restless and Baywatch as he possibly could and casually wondered whether or not a person could actually make a whole feature length film by re-editing a decade's worth of disparate and unrelated clips. The result was this.... every cut is odd and doesn't make sense or fit with the preceding, each 'scene' is questionable with regard to any idea of a plot or cohesion, all the actors look like they are improvising, or someone just handed them a script 10 minutes prior. You can imagine how difficult and awkward such a scenario would be for a normal film, but picture that same scenario for a film with a plot that doesn't make any sense, "you got 10 minutes to look like you're taking this seriously...and ACTION!" I almost feel sorry for those actors and the difficulty of the task they were given but sadly, truthfully they probably got ample time to realise this film should never have gotten to production and still went ahead with it and probably even rehearsed the terrible performances.

To give one positive, Yekaterina Rednikova, a Russian actor who as a western audience member I've never seen before, is incredibly good looking and it almost doesn't matter how terrible the film is, you can just not hear and block out completely the awful dialogue and get lost in her eyes, I hope she shows up in something better than this that I'll likely see sometime in the future because, DAMN!