Serious-minded science fiction, allegorical as you like, about an epidemic of “the white sickness,” a new form of sightlessness that plunges the sufferer into blinding light instead of traditional darkness. We experience this from the point of view, so to speak, of several dozen people left to their own devices in pigpen quarantine, so that we have little idea how widespread the problem is — the population in quarantine hardly seems unmanageable — and no idea of developments and discussions in the outside world. Within this hermitage, factions form, oppressors emerge, war erupts. (Lapse in serious-mindedness: the chief oppressor, the possessor of the lone gun, breaks out in a Stevie Wonder song. It could as well have been a Ray Charles or a Jose Feliciano.) The arty photography indulges in a lot of white-out effects to convey subjectively the sensation of “swimming in milk.” But even in its straightforward narrative duties, even before the first onset of the disease, it has a quality of overexposure that erases color and detail. We might have been disposed to interpret this as a critique of trendy cinematography — a cinematic epidemic of partial blindness — if director Fernando Meirelles hadn’t favored it in other contexts: City of God and The Constant Gardener. And the storytelling has a slow-going, groping, bumbling manner that suggests, if not quite blindness, at least a lack of focus and precision, an inability to hit a nail on the head. The seriousness of the situation, particularly the squalor of the living conditions, is clear enough. The drama of it is blurred. Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo, Gael García Bernal, Alice Braga, Danny Glover. (2008) — Duncan Shepherd