Oct 051981
 
two reels

The light from a mysterious meteor shower blinds everyone who sees it, causing civilization to collapse. Bill Masen (John Duttine), who was undergoing eye treatment on that night, is one of the few who can see. He finds Jo (Emma Relph), a sighted woman, and they plan their survival. However, they are captured and separated by a large band of blind people and forced to guide them. An even more mysterious plague kills their captors, and Bill sets out to find Jo. Making everything more dangerous are the triffids, walking carnivorous plants, originally designed in Russia for their oil, that are spreading across the world.

This BBC miniseries is more faithful to John Wyndham’s novel than the 1962 movie, but the job of a film (or series) is not to match its source material, but to be entertaining or informative on its own terms. In some cases, the first film’s divergence from the book (such as the addition of the subplot involving two scientists barricaded in a lighthouse) made the story more complex and interesting. Granted, some changes were less inspired (the narrated ending), but at least they invoked tension or excitement or…something.

At just under three hours, this Day of the Triffids plods along.The culprits: a weak second act and an insufficient budget. Even with cheesy, psychedelic opening credits and claustrophobic sets, things start well, with Bill discovering the world has fallen apart as he slept. There are a few unnecessary flashbacks to give us information we don’t need, but there’s some genuine drama when Bill encounters both the blind and the sighted who’ve gone savage. But there’s very little dramatic, or of any interest while Bill is a captive of the blind people. He’s about as passive a protagonist as you’ll find. He could escape, fight, or lead, but he doesn’t do any of those things. His later obsessive desire to find a girl he barely knows is hard to accept when he spent so little effort in getting to her for so long. This middle section ends with a disease that pops out of nowhere and kills whoever the script no longer needs. Its only purpose is to allow Bill to have new adventures. I suppose the idea of the “sighted man in the land of the blind” segment was to look at society via its disintegration, but don’t expect any insights.

The low, BBC TV budget is visible in every scene. This is a tale of sweeping apocalyptic terror, but most of the time is spent in small rooms with people talking. The streets are strangely empty (extras cost money). London has millions of people, and the meteors only blinded them; it didn’t disintegrate them. But based on what’s shown, the metro area couldn’t have had a population of more than a few hundred. Our hero even runs into the same folks repeatedly. The streets are also free of cars and litter. Didn’t anyone go blind while driving?

A lot of cutting could still make this a worthwhile sci-fi piece. Not only could trimming help the pace, keep the story on track, and hide some of the cheapness, but it could make Bill someone I could care about. As is, he’s too placid, humorless, and indecisive to drum up much emotion from me. If he dies of a triffid sting, why should I care? Plus, without the disease (easy to remove), there would be one less disaster to break my suspension of disbelief. It’s asking a bit much of an audience to accept walking plants, blinding meteors, and a plague all coincidentally hitting at the same time. Bill does suggest an extremely unlikely tie between the three, but the less said of that, the better.