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Blindness is a very good example of the genre of 'very interesting concept, shame the film fails it miserably.' Despite a vaguely reasonable start, this descends into a plot-hole-ridden and tonally suspect mess. Based on a prize-winning book, you've got to suspect the film isn't a very faithful translation. Or that the book is also a plot-hole-ridden mess.

We start with some slowly spreading disease that is mysteriously causing blindness. Inevitably, this causes serious problems for the structure of society when it starts to spread to a large proportion of the population, and results in a ham-fisted government response that doesn't exactly make things better. So far, so reasonable. But then the film focuses on a small, isolated community in a government quarantine that descends, entirely unbelieveably, into a bizarre Lord of the Flies-esque scenario which has so many things wrong with it I find it hard to know where to start. First, our supposed heroine can actually see, having lied in order to stay with her husband. But apparently not a single other person has thought to do that, so she's the only person with sight in there. Even given that, is it reasonable to assume that all of a sudden all of the amazing self-sacrificing people who deal with the sick, even at terrible risk to themselves, have disappeared from the earth overnight? Is there not a nurse, or a nun, or a priest, or someone terminally ill anyway, who could help these people out? And if our heroine is the only person who seems immune to the disease, shouldn't she actually admit that to someone? She would be separated from her husband and quite possibly horribly experimented on, but if she and she alone potentially holds the cure to something destroying the entire world, you'd think the heroic thing to do would be to pipe up.

Then it gets much worse. One guy has a gun, though no-one cares to tell us how he actually got it in. This allows him to set up a dictatorship of the quarantine, impose martial law, and require other groups to give him first their valuables (what's he going to do with them? Surely whatever they are being exchanged *for* is far more useful in this scenario?) and then their women, in order to get supplies to continue to exist. Cue a long, gratuitous and unpleasant rape scene. The key problem is, of course, that a blind man with a gun is no match whatever for someone who can still see! Our supposed heroine could stop this nasty little dictator in his tracks in the blink of an eye, but instead chooses to subject herself and all the other people to degradation, misery, and violent rape. Huh? 'In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king', though apparently the writers didn't bother to think about that. Such rank stupidity destroys any credibility the film may try to hold onto.

When they finally do revolt, using their incredible advantage of someone who can actually see, they obviously win easily. Fortunately at exactly that moment the guards have decided to leave their quarantine unguarded and unlocked, so they can go onto the streets and fight their way through the zombies, err, blind people, and try to carry on living. Using her sight, she finds stocks of food that the blind can't find. Then, err, has a big fight with lots of blind people over the stock she has found, when she could trivially (and rather more humanely) let these starving people have that stock and gone back and got some more for herself. Eh? There's a raining scene, with swelling music that I guess we're supposed to think is important or emotional somehow, but nothing happens so I've no idea what that was about. They then all end up at her house, which has miraculously remained free of looting even through everywhere else seems to have been broken into, and live an odd sequestered life where apparently they never get pestered by the millions of blind people outside. There's a gratuitous women showering scene for no reason whatever. To finish the film, the first guy that lost his sight miraculously gets it back, no explanation. An old guy gives a narration that suggests there are advantages to a society of blindness - another annoyance, the intermittent narration by this guy which just blurts in occasionally without any real pattern or necessity. And that's the end.

I don't really mind the lack of explanation for the blindness itself, but I'm less keen about the idea to restrict the focus onto a narrow group of people in one place rather than a bigger picture, particularly so when that is then handled in such a poor and unrealistic fashion. The holes in this plot destroy the film.

The film looks very bleached and washed-out. There's a few interesting 'blindness' effects, but basically this looks pretty miserable. Which is fair enough for a 'collapse of society' film, I suppose, but it seems odd that it looks like that before society beings to collapse. Julianne Moore is decent enough as our 'heroine' but the character acts in such a ridiculous way I don't think you could make this work very well at all. Mark Ruffalo is ok, though I'm not sure his blindness was entirely convincing all the time. (One line states that he can't wipe his own bum now he's blind. Why on earth not?!?!) Danny Glover does an ok job with the bizarre character of 'guy who turns up halfway through and tells a story, and then suddenly becomes a part-time narrator'.

A complete mess of a film, this is just about bearable to sit through once but you've got to wonder if the writers thought about what it was they were writing. The only message seems to be 'civil society breaks down when things go wrong' which is hardly new and has rarely been executed as incompetently. Good idea, little style, no substance. 3.5 out of 10.

A rather welcome and novel addition to the Holocaust movie genre, Defiance stands out by showing the persecuted Jews in the Second World War as actual human beings - defiant, willing to resist and fight, squabbling among themselves, compassionate on occasion but cruel on occasion, with little bits of gritty humour intervening in the general unhappy situation they find themselves in. For that alone, this is a valuable film. More than that, this is more or less a true story (a little embellished, apparently, but not a great deal). It's highly refreshing to see the Jewish people in WW2 portrayed as normal people subject to a horrific persecution, rather than entirely helpless whiter-than-white victims.

Indeed, our heroes here are actually petty criminals who put their knowledge of avoiding the law to good use when the law begins to collaborate with the occupying Nazis. It makes for a good story of survival against all odds, with a good mix of characters and a story which progresses naturally, if perhaps dragging on for just a little bit too long. Certainly the dissension in the camp and the resolutions reached feel a lot more natural than other films where people have to come together in adversity. It's not clean or nice, but it is satisfying. One scene is notable, when they capture a young German and beat him to death - we rightly shy away from summary and unpleasant 'justice', but we have to have some sympathy for these people who finally get the chance to beat back at a representative of those responsible for their misery, even if it is unfair to single out a young conscript over those in charge of policy. It's a challenging scene, and one that has obvious analogies to all manner of issues in the modern world, but I digress.

Daniel Craig is very good indeed in this, with an accent that could be very annoying but manages not to be. This is a far more rounded, human person than his James Bond has so far managed, and shows what he could achieve with better scripts for Bond. Liev Schreiber is also rather good, though his character suffers a little from being at the centre of the least interesting part of the story - the Russian sub-plot - and from being the almost deus-ex-machina reappearing right at the required moment at the end of the movie to help out when all hope seems lost. Jamie Bell is ok too, though feels a bit under-developed given he has a reasonably large role. Mia Wasikowska is notably restrained and cute as the main young female part, which bodes well for her upcoming role as Alice in Johnny Depp's Alice In Wonderland (which certainly sounds an interesting project!).

I enjoyed this film a lot, with just the small caveats of it being a little long and a little meandering on occasion. But if you're going to do another Holocaust film, there's a lot of value in doing something a bit different and showing some real, for lack of a better word, defiance. 8.5 out of 10.