Land of the Blind (2006)

This movie is like an IQ test. If you believe Land Of The Blind is any good, you're not nearly as smart as you think you are. It has a sheen of intellect but there's nothing underneath but confusion.This story starts with a man named Joe (Ralph Fiennes) sitting in a blindingly white room, tapping out his life story on an old fashioned typewriter. It's a story of oppression, revolution, more oppression, counterrevolution and elephants. No, I don't know what the elephants are supposed to mean. Told in flashback, it begins with Joe as a prison guard watching over a playwright turned terrorist name Thorne (Donald Sutherland). Thorne was thrown into prison for leading a resistance movement against the stupid and brutal rule of Generalissimo President-For-Life Maximilian II (Tom Hollander), the Nero-ish son of a deceased Mussolini-ish dictator. The first half of the film is about Joe growing closer to Thorne and disgusted with the rule of Maximilian II. But after Joe helps Thorne assassinate Maximilian II, Thorne creates an even stupider and more brutal tyranny. Joe ends up in a re-education camp and then the film ends with one of those endings that's supposed to blow your mind. And if you have the mind of a syphilitic chipmunk, it might be blown away. If you have a normal human brain, however, the only thing that will shock you is that actually wasted nearly 2 hours of your life watching this pretentious and self-indulgent load of crap.This is a dumb person's idea of a clever movie. It's a melange of history, politics, fashion, culture and even architecture. The script mushes together European fascism, American demagogic populism, the Khmer Rouge and radical Islam. It splices together the look of the British royal family, 1950s America, post-war Germany, pre-Revolution France, the palaces of India and the public imagery of Saddam Hussein's Iraq. It tries to spritz sarcasm about commercialism, vapid and propagandistic TV news, anti-terrorism efforts and democracy. It had to have taken a lot of time and a lot of effort to meld all the disparate elements and references in this script. When all the pieces of the puzzle are put together, however, it forms the picture of a giant turd.Virtually none of the supposedly clever aspects of this story make any sense at all if you think about them for more than 15 seconds. Take the character of Maximilian II. He's supposed to be Nero but he's also supposed to be George W. Bush and he's supposed to be Ronald Reagan and he's supposed to be the sons of Saddam Hussein and he's supposed to be an evil version of Prince Charles and he's supposed to be Louis XIV. It did take a certain amount of skill to weave all those different people together, but what do they have in common with each other? At first blush, Maximilian II might appear to be a very smartly written character. But the more you consider him, you realize that he's so many different things that he's really nothing but a inanimate prop. Thorne is just the same. He starts out idealistic revolutionary and then becomes unreflective fanatic for no reason other than that's what the script say he does.Land of the Blind has pretenses of being a black comedy, but it's neither funny for particularly dark. It wants to satirize the Republican America of George W. Bush, but it's so toothless all it can do is drool. It wants to hold the concept of democracy up to ridicule, but it doesn't say anything the Greeks didn't say much better a few thousand years ago. Instead of Land Of The Blind, it should have been titled Sound And Fury, Signifying Nothing.

I wont devote too much time to reviewing this film for the following reason:There's nothing wrong with a political message if you respect the medium that's being used to express it.This film has bad cinematography, bad directing, bad lighting, very average music, a bad pace , bad dialogue, and none devoted actors... What are Fiennes and Sutherland doing in this film?Robert Edwards may be a more intellectual type than Uwe Boll but his directing and writing skills are of no higher standard.Please Edwards, do better next time or make use of other mediums for your idea's. I don't however believe you'd be very successful with such a horrible movie on your resume.

Of course. For those who don't see it: Firstly, the most obvious reference to bush is the "hearts and mind" crap.More importantly THE ELEPHANT! It's a parallel between the symbol of the totalitarian U.S. political party and fascism depicted in the film. The other meaning of the elephants is of course that they have good memory, just like the protagonist.Thirdly, the father-son thing, about the father being shrewd and the son being a sadistic idiot/airhead. gh bush vs. dub-ya!! no doubt about it. the stabbing of the associate: reference to bush firing his ministers and or Colin Powell. When put to the writer, he'd probably say: "Wow, I am glad someone spotted that in the film."Then again, it's a work of art, and whatever it does to you, it does to you. And it could also be seen as critique of Iran/Persia. but the Islamic veils etc. are probably a mockery of the USA.

I was very disappointed in this film. The story and the point of the author is presented in a heavy-handed, and cliché manner. The author's hyperbole denies the possibility of balance. He argues against change, and allows that only extremes in the swing of the pendulum of social change are possible. He makes his point unapologetically without subtlety.His indelicate way of making this point is a little like writing into a story too many soliloquies to describing the feelings of the principal characters without just showing those things, and letting the audience figure it out. He over tells his story. He's taken too big a picture in too short a span of time, and indelicately made his transitions. The filmmaker says to his audience, "I'm not a good enough filmmaker to make my point subtly, or you're is just too stupid to get my point unless I explicitly tell you.Its good casting, they're good actors but Sutherland plays his part a little too smug too self-righteous to be believable, rather like his thief in the "Italian Job." Not the best work in either place of a normally good actor. The characters are waterfront artist's caricatures.Whose story is he telling? Is it Cuba, South Africa, Haiti, WW2 Germany, or Romania? He's hyperbolized elements of all those places into one. The story could have been very good, and a more effective political statement with a lot less. It tries to hard, and fails to be an effective vehicle as a political statement, or a good story. Skip this movie. Don't waste your time or money.