The fates of a Neanderthal family, a modern-day couple, and a futuristic astronaut intertwine across the annals of human history.
Veritable eons ago, Stanley Kubrick bridged the ancient yesterday to the distant tomorrow with a miraculous transition in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Modern moviegoers might yawn at that famous cut from femur to spaceship; these days, Marvel blockbusters span centuries with abandon. The achingly earnest new sci-fi drama In The Blink Of An Eye leaps whole millennia and back again multiple times over. Will audiences even, well, blink at its cross-cutting ambition?
Directed by Pixar wizard Andrew Stanton (WALL•E, the forthcoming Toy Story 5), this streaming-banished riddle juggles three timelines, toggling between mankind’s past, present and future. We begin sometime during the Pleistocene Epoch, where a family of Neanderthals struggles to survive. No sooner have we met them than we’re blipped forward hundreds of thousands of years to follow an academic (Rashida Jones) studying their remains while coping with a family illness and a long-distance relationship. Meanwhile — or rather, much later still — a lone astronaut (Kate McKinnon) settles into a space odyssey. Her mission: relocate a vulnerable cargo of embryos across the cosmos to humanity’s new home.
We’re all connected by our need for connection, the movie concludes — a less-than-profound insight to glean from the whole of human history.
Watching In The Blink Of An Eye, it’s easy to see why it spent a Hollywood eternity unseen — first as a script nobody would film, then as a movie nobody would release. The respective stories of this intercut triptych never take on a life of their own. Having once wrung great pathos from the travails of a lonely robot, Stanton struggles to lend the similarly wordless dawn-of-man scenes here any visual or dramatic interest; they’re anthropological filler. Jones and Daveed Diggs have good chemistry in the 21st-century plotline, but their tentative romance must, by necessity, unfold in fast-forward montage. Likewise, while it’s nice to see McKinnon tamp down her sketch-comic zaniness to play scene partner to a friendlier HAL 9000, she’s starring in a survival thriller reduced to essential functions only.
We’re all connected by our need for connection, the movie concludes — a less-than-profound insight to glean from the whole of human history. Maybe animation could have animated such prosaic wisdom. But as with John Carter, a live-action canvas limits Stanton’s imagination. Even the tinkle of a Thomas Newman score can’t provide a Pixarian sense of wonder. Don’t expect Kubrickian splendour, either, from an epic with the chronological scope of 2001 but none of the wow factor. Meditating drippily on the grand cycle of life, In The Blink Of An Eye plays more like Cloud Atlas as a self-help seminar. Into the streaming void it now goes, destined to fossilise under the sands of time.
WALL•E director Andrew Stanton weaves together three different stories across three different eras of human history. The result is a streaming epic as painfully sappy as it is structurally ambitious.