Watch Land of the Blind For Free

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

Easily the biggest piece of Right wing non sense propaganda I ever saw.

Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.

There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

This is a grim tale about how totalitarian regimes try to ban the free spirit out of the minds of their citizens. Performances by Ralph Fiennes, as the warden sympathetic to the cause, and Donald Sutherland, as the imprisoned rebel leader, are both splendid. I liked the satirical approach to the subject. Despite its harsh and eerie subject - the cycle of violence concerning revolutions and contra-revolutions - it is also very funny movie on a darker level. It's an absolute blast to spot the existing dictatorial regimes they mixed up to create the most horrible regime imaginable.Another great movie getting a mediocre score. It's a shame. Though I do understand that this is not the material for your average escapism of everyday life. This grim and violent tale is perhaps only interesting for those with an interest in modern history.

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.

Most reviewers have already noted the similarity to Brazil, Animal Farm and 1984, which struck me right away. A dictator is overthrown in a popular uprising, only to become a dictator himself. I enjoyed the contrast between the opulent lifestyle of Maximilian II and the squalid prison where Thorne the dissident writer was being held. Donald Sutherland plays the writer, looking for all the world like Karl Marx. The scenes of the saccharine TV anchors playing verbal ping pong were just priceless and right on the mark. Tom Hollander, who previously played Kim Philby in "Cambridge Spies" was superb in the role of Maximilian.My only gripe is that I had the impression that this would have been a good film if I had been able to hear it rather than just watch. Unfortunately, I saw this film on DVD, and there were no close captions. This is incredible! As a hearing impaired person I need the captions to know what they are saying, otherwise, by the time I have figured it out, I have missed a few sentences. With a detailed plot it is essential to be able to follow the dialog.

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?