Nearly 15 years since his last foray into live-action filmmaking, Andrew Stanton attempts to channel some of the same ambition that drove 2012’s John Carter into the more modest In the Blink of an Eye. The film is a kind of relay narrative across time that begins in the Neanderthal age before leaping to our present and, eventually, centuries into the future, ruminating along the way about the ties that bind humanity across the epochs. In the Blink of an Eye’s structure calls to mind Cloud Atlas, but where that film aimed for an operatic grandeur to match the loftiness of its concept, this one often feels like a comedy without a punchline.
Stanton’s film flits between timelines on matched actions that are too cute by half. A gruff rutting session between a Neanderthal couple (Tanaya Beatty and Jorge Vargas) abruptly cuts to the far less passionate sex between anthropologist Claire (Rashida Jones) and colleague Greg (Daveed Diggs). Insinuations are made throughout that Claire is studying the very bones of the primitive humans seen in the past, while her inability to extricate herself from her smartphone links to the future where astronaut Coakley (Kate McKinnon) heads on a deep space mission accompanied only by her ship’s slightly infantilizing artificial intelligence.
While the stakes of each timeline range from basic survival against the elements to the annoyances of modern dating, In the Blink of an Eye, as written by Colby Day, finds the through line between the stories in the simplistic theme of humans from time immemorial searching for a sense of belonging and connection. This is the core idea underneath almost all network narratives, but Stanton’s film struggles to add anything new to the genre.
Splitting a slim, 94-minute runtime across three distinct stories reduces each to a grab bag of signifiers of longing and anxiety over the inevitability of losing loved ones. That one of these potential lost companions is Coakley’s Ring camera-shaped A.I. only compounds the total lack of investment in any character or their difficulties beyond the basic universal struggle of life.
A final-act pivot away from fears of death to celebrations of new life is just as trite, swapping hollow glimpses of mourning for equally shallow montages of kids being adorable as adults attempt to prepare them for the next phase of the cycle. In the Blink of an Eye feels less like a film than a commercial for life insurance that got out of hand, or perhaps more accurately one for the kind of hollow Silicon Valley tech optimism that has been thoroughly exposed as a sham by now. Say what you will about Tom Tykwer and the Wachowskis’ ungainly tribute to human connectivity across Cloud Atlas, that film doesn’t end with a glorified Theranos TED Talk.
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