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I’m not really one of those people who’s ever really trusted the government. They’ve made entirely too many major mistakes for me to put a whole lot of trust in them. After all, these are the guys who brought you “ketchup is a vegetable”.

But then again, I don’t much trust people much either, and if you ever wanted a good look at a slow descent into barbarism of the kind that’ll make you want to go out and buy a shotgun, just take a good long look at Disney’s Blindness. Yeah, this is all coming to us from Disney, by way of Miramax.

Basically, there’s a strange disease roaming the countryside, and possibly the entire planet, steadily turning the populace blind. In a bid to keep the disease from spreading, the government sets up a quarantine zone in what looks like a hospital. But the government’s efforts at containment aren’t going very well–the population of that quarantine zone gets bigger with every passing day and even figures in the government are starting to come down with it. As the quarantine zone grows more and more populated, it doesn’t take long for the criminal element to slip in, and soon, the quarantine zone is run by vicious criminals who take over the food supply. Will everyone else make it through alive? And what will happen after that?

This is an extraordinarily important movie–not because we’re all likely to be struck blind soon but rather because this is an excellent look at what life is like without a very precious little thing called the rule of law. Without the rule of law, people who would normally be criminals can run amok without anything but regular people to stand in their way, and regular people aren’t normally given to vigilante justice, the only kind of justice there is in a society without the rule of law. You’re going to see that point in almost heartbreaking detail in this one.

But by like token, you’re also going to see some real human decency here. You’re going to see just about every kind of behavior human beings can exhibit in a crisis–you’re going to see love and compassion and generosity and incompetence and horror and misery and greed and everything else.

You’re going to see everything…whether you like it or not.

It doesn’t surprise me that this was a translation from a book, and that the guy who wrote it won a Nobel prize. Because for what faults this movie has, like a cookie-cutter happy ending and some bizarre choices made by the “good” guys of the quarantine zone, it’s still an amazing look at humanity in crisis.

This could easily be one of the most literary and engaging of all the dystopian movies out there, and there have been plenty of dystopian titles. I count myself something of an expert in dystopian fare, having seen the world threatened by alien invasion and by demon horde and by disease, zombie, bad weather and everything in between, but without doubt, the biggest threat is inevitably man.

So basically, Blindness is an incredibly hard-hitting look at man without law, and if you can’t get enough of the dystopian, take a hold of this one. And just to complete the punchline offered by the headline:

…and he is us.

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