In the Blink of an Eye (2026)
Directed by: Andrew Stanton
Premise: Three intercut stories spanning thousands of years. At the dawn of mankind, early Homo sapiens and Neanderthals form a village. In the present day, an anthropologist copes with her ailing mother. In the distant future, a space explorer escorts human embryos to a new planet.
What Works: In the Blink of an Eye deserves credit for its ambition. The filmmakers try to make a big statement about life and human endurance across the centuries. Of the three narratives, the present-day story is the most interesting. Rashida Jones plays an anthropologist who is socially withdrawn but has a romantic connection with another academic played by Daveed Diggs while she copes with her mother’s illness. The relationship between Jones and Diggs’ characters is the film’s most interesting conflict and only part that has any depth. Her emotional timidity and unwillingness to commit creates an interesting contrast with the other stories and suggests interesting implications about society, technology, and human intimacy.
What Doesn’t: In the Blink of an Eye only runs ninety-four minutes and it feels as though it needed to be considerably longer. None of the narratives have adequate space to breathe and develop. The future story especially suffers. A space explorer played by Kate McKinnon escorts human embryos to a colony on a distant planet but the ship’s plant-based reoxygenation system begins to fail. Despite the stakes, there is very little drama. The story lacks tension or conflict as McKinnon’s character solves the problem. She births some of the embryos during the voyage, creating a new crew, which would seem to exacerbate the oxygen problem, and the latter part of the story makes big leaps into the future. The present-day story has a similar problem as it leaps decades ahead, discarding the intimate conflicts that made the characters interesting. The prehistoric story is about a Neanderthal family coming to live with early Homo sapiens but their story has no drama at all. The transitions between the storylines are often arbitrary and the parallels between the three stories are not interesting. Links between these characters are eventually revealed but those connections are sometimes ludicrous there’s no meaning to any of it. In the end, the filmmakers try to force a profound final statement about humanity, civilization, and legacy but there’s just nothing here. The big thematic and emotional beats are not earned and the filmmakers obnoxiously spell out the message with on-the-nose narration. The movie also looks sterile and fake, especially the spaceship shots that look like 2000s sci-fi television.
Disc extras: Available on Hulu.
Bottom Line: In the Blink of an Eye aspires to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life but this is pretentious nonsense and the harder In the Blink of an Eye tries to emulate those classics the more obvious its deficiencies become.
Episode: #1090 (March 8, 2026)