Thanks for the memories!

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

The acting in this movie is really good.

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

Really a most thought-provoking dystopia film with a bizarre ending that like most great movies - leaving you wondering...It drags a bit and is quite silly in the first half hour, but then it picks up, adding elements, symbolism, styles and phrases of dystopian regimes throughout the past 2-300 years. The basic plot tells of a shift between an aristocratic fascist consumerist decadent regime to a fundamentalist communist anti-knowledge mobocratic one - most similar in style to what happened in Russia post 1917, the first part, and China post 1949 or even Iran post 1979, the second part.Throughout, the film intersperses bits of rhetoric that make you ponder as to what its message might be. Unexplained vignettes of Elephants and Schizophrenia deepen the message and add layers to what might originally come across as popcorn-satire with a powerful cast. The apparent twist towards the end is well executed and is the cherry on top. But it certainly could have been made with more finesse, but then perhaps it would have been too serious to hold any box-office appeal, which political satire always must capture - for otherwise it would not be of much purpose.

Robert Edwards' 2006 film The Land of the Blind is ultimately a tale of how absolute power corrupts, absolutely. The film is stark in its imagery and tone, its gross mixture of everything from its colour palette to other general, discomforting and disorientating content giving it a very distinct feel; so much so that it's an odd thing Edwards has not gone on to produce, by way of writing or otherwise, some more projects since. I got the feeling this was, indeed, one man's view on how the hypothesis of complete control completely corrupts and destroys an individual from within and those they might watch over; unlike Donald Sutherland's character very early on in the film, we do not necessarily have a complete turd on our hands here. But something lacked; something was missing. The film's sole source of shocks derives from its sporadic and disturbing imagery spotted along throughout, not from its would-be disturbing and enthralling in equal measure decline in well being and moral consciousness of the leaders on show; as if the coming and going of the two chief characters in charge plays second fiddle to the grotesque other stuff dreamt up so as to shock. While the film just about pulls off what it sets out to achieve, it's at a wavering and frustrating cost.The film provides us with the character of Joe, played by Ralph Fiennes; initially a security guard at a high security prison in a nation run by a remorseless; disgraceful; gross and political correctness disregarding dictator named Maximilian II (Hollander), a man who has inherited the kingdom from his father and continues the brutal ruling of it. Hollander does a good job in playing this small, wormy, measly little man whom just happens to have landed the most powerful job in the world. The third member of the triple threat the film revolves around is the prisoner Joe is charged with observing, a certain free thinking elderly man of a supposed politically driven opposite to that of Maximillian II, named Thorne and played by the aforementioned Sutherland. The first time we see Joe, he is sitting in an alarmingly small Gilliam's Brazil-style room typing his memoirs, thus recounting to us the tale of the two regimes. In providing him as the middleman, the film has a lynch-pin or anchor around which the general study of two differing political men, be it stark differences in items ranging from overall age to intelligence, with power can just bring about their own downfalls. In beginning and ending with Joe the prison guard, although ambiguously so nearer the end thanks to some somewhat frustrating scenes that suggest mental illness in our Joe, we're able to see that regardless of who it is that's in power; there are winners and losers of each and every belief or political ideology. In thinking he was initially lending a helping hand for the opposition, despite things looking good for him, things were never quite as rosy as they seemed.Edwards' idea that the state within his film could be representative of any nation throughout history, corrupt or otherwise, is impressively established with a glut of varying mise-en-scene, further still aiding in the disorientating feel the film has. Maximillian II rules a locale which on the surface, is a visually-driven clash between Stalinist Russia with Georgian England, with various other items such as the music characters play to themselves straight out of the 1940s; but whose flag looks like Argentina's (no doubt a reference to the Argentinian regime of the late-1970s) and whose language is certainly English with the national sport seemingly being basketball. Thorne is a prisoner of beliefs and publishing's, thus is suffering the regulations of censorship so knows the trials and pains of being a prisoner of that ilk. He seems to win Joe over as they talk through the prison walls with poem quotations; tales of his plight and so forth, but later on when Thorne gets into power, he goes on to enforce a degree of censorship on certain things. I like to think of this as the point rather than character inconsistencies within Thorne; that with the obtaining of so much power after so much graft, no matter how well meaning the individual came across as in times of great strain, the being granted of so much power will usually have a detrimental effect on the individual.After suffering a great deal in a world that sees the shallow and narrow minded rewarded, with the creative and academics punished, we feel Thorne's attitudes were merely the lesser of two evils on the whole; particularly evident when the hate supposedly transfered onto the victims of the state come back to haunt them when the uprising sees a ridiculously unfair trial of the former leader, which features the gagging of one person on trial and the sole witness being the one who's in the process of electing themselves the new leader. For all Thorne's struggling when we observe him in his jail cell citing poems; having to write with his own excrement and suffering brutal beatings at the hands of the guards, he certainly packs a mean political punch of his own in dealing with those that do not entirely agree with him and his political ideologies. The film's colourful look and somewhat comedic overall tone stands in deliberately stark contrast to what's playing out, a tale of absolute power absolutely corrupting; two different plights: in the character of Joe, one of morality which later manifests as one spawned by suppression suffering by the state with Thorne's mirroring this in that it takes a similar structure but the other way around. Its successes lie at its core, around which an often lumbering and usually disgusting spectacle of very little drama unfolds. I liked some of what I saw but the point is made relatively rapidly and the film knows this is all it has while things generally fall apart after the first third.

The Land of the Blind is a rather decent first movie and script, yet it has many glaring faults, the most obvious one simply being it doesn't know where it wants to go halfway through. One gets the impression that if the creator had it his way, the film would be two hours longer.The first hour of the movie is more or less superb. Especially crafty are the news broadcasts (reminiscent of the forced lightheartedness of Japanese television) that include advertisements of products. The news segments are irreverent, silly lampoonery, and could have easily been situated in Mike Judge's Idiocracy world- yet somehow, unbelievably, the news segments and other over-the-top lampoons are never taken for being quite as idiotic as they could be, which I think is a great testament to the overall serious tone the movie holds. Like Catch-22, the more absurd moments in the first half of the movie might make us laugh, but if they do it is at our own expense.Yet after Joe's fateful decision, and the changing of the guard, the movie diddles and pops out of cohesiveness and all but loses its footing. The difficulty the creators of this film face is fierce: how do they show things haven't changed while changing things enough so we're not bored? Their answer is a muddy montage of images that take us more out of reality and into a confusing state that lacks any emotional effect. No new insight that hasn't been told by the simplest morality Utopian tale is offered; the last quarter of the movie seems like the beginning of Papillon.And indeed, where once the satirical elements of the first half were inspiring, now they become grating. It becomes sadly obvious that Joe and Donald Sutherland are the only characters in the film's world with any semblance of intelligence or free will; everyone else is mere blind sheep, ciphers, straw men. The serious satirical tone the film mastered in the first half fizzles into parody, a Green Acres squalor of familiar set pieces and situations. The movie's credibility is totally lost. The Land of The Blind is a satirical place, and its inhabitants aren't to be taken as anything more than straw men, but by the second half the pathos and music montages and fancy CG cuts are sprinkled a little too graciously to spice the film up, and the viewer's patience and involvement with any sort of parallel reality wears too thin.I enjoyed the settings, and how they were filmed. All the acting was brilliant, especially Junior as the Vista Street-directing little tyrant and Donald Sutherland as the complicated revolutionary. Even Ralph Fiennes (who I've always though looks a little bit like Mrs. Doubtfire) was in top form. But I did not like the puzzlement aspect of some things. Too many puzzle and references may make the audience feel smart, but ultimately they are a magic trick, hiding the lack of original content. And ultimately there is nothing very original about Land of the Blind, and there will be little consequence to its lack of fanfare.

Many others have commented on this "homage" to all satires of a political bent and its hodge-podge of referenced dictators, and I can only agree. Pol Pot, Hess, Mussolini, Caligula, Winston Smith, they're all here, filtered through a film school montage of techniques and borrowings. It's all very unsatisfactory, character motivations are opaque and inconsistent, and the tone is uneven, uncertain if it is satirical comedy or mockumentary expose.The ostensible message identified by other reviewers of the movie - that all resistance to tyrants by ordinary people is futile - is, however, less clear to me. Yhe very fragmented nature of the final ten minutes or so seems not to have been commented on either here or in professional reviews. To write it off as a descent into madness, as it has been, seems to ignore a certain poignancy and trickiness of the closing scene, where the daughter leaves her father in a flat on a council estate (looking like somewhere in South London), gets into the lift and weeps. Are we meant to conclude that everything that has gone before is the delusion of a madman, typing his story endlessly to the exclusion of the real? Or that the hypercoloured parody of the bulk of the film is a metaphor for the life that we Winstons live in apparent freedom but actual oppression? A block of flats, uniform, utilitarian, where people try and make a life for themselves lacks the drama of a North Korea or Cambodia, and the censorship and mental poverty may be invisible to us since we are not starving or sent to re-education camps or explicitly tortured. Maybe I am being too generous to this very flawed film, but the ending has left me with many questions than anything else in the movie, since it seems to require us to go back and look again at the rest of the movie. Are we so remote from this exaggerated, fictional country? Is it just a matter of degree?