Andrew Stanton is one of those filmmakers you constantly root for to be successful. The Wall-E director hit a home run with that Pixar classic, but finding live-action success has proven to be more stubborn. His massively-budgeted John Carter was an embarrassing flop, and there has been negative buzz swirling around his latest, In the Blink of an Eye, which Disney is dumping onto Hulu next month. It’s unfortunate that this ambitious project, spanning the past, present, and far-flung future, is such a cloying effort with awful casting choices. Stanton and screenwriter Colby Day’s intentions are clearly honorable and even respectable, but that’s about as far as it goes.
The film begins with the origins of life itself, before zipping us to 45,000 BC, the “end of the Neanderthal age”, we are told. We are introduced to a proto-human family, led by the patriarch Thorn (Jorge Vargas), who, along with his wife, daughter, and newborn child, is the last of their kind. Thorn finds himself injured in a fall, and must be cared for by the family. They continue to face various trials until the emergence of a new clan, homo sapiens, poses a danger they do not yet understand.
Zooming into the present, we have the least effective of the three stories. Rashida Jones and Daveed Diggs lack any chemistry whatsoever as an anthropology major and a statistician, respectively, who begin an awkward friends-with-benefits relationship. They grow closer as she deals with her mother’s terminal illness, but nothing about this pairing rings true. We’re given little reason to believe that Jones’ character, who finds it easier connecting with the fossilized proto-human in her lab than with living people, would fall in love with the personality-free Diggs. That both actors are wildly inappropriate for these roles is exaggerated by a flavorless screenplay that does them no favors. Their relationship mostly unfolds through phone calls and zooms, and while the characters comment on this sad long-distance thing they have going on, it doesn’t excuse how much of a bore it is for us to watch.
By far the most successful story takes us into the future, where Kate McKinnon is Coakley, an astronaut gifted with long life, on an interstellar voyage transporting embryos to a new home planet. We learn that circumstances on Earth have necessitated this journey, and Coakley, along with her only friend, AI assistant ROSCO (voiced by Rhona Rees), are being counted on to save humanity. But there’s a problem. The plants needed to provide oxygen are sick and dying, and Coakley is forced to make a heartbreaking sacrifice to complete the mission. The tightest emotional connection in the entire movie is forged between Coakley and ROSCO, and if there was a segment that could be fully expanded into an entertaining movie, it’s this one.
As these stories unfold, we are constantly clued in to how they connect. There are the existential themes of life, death, and renewal prevalent in each. But more directly, an heirloom makes its way across millennia, becoming part of the scientific journey to find that missing link between early man and our future.
The problem with Stanton, as seen again with In the Blink of an Eye, is that he’s not a particularly dynamic filmmaker. It’s strange that someone who is so successful with animation, where literally anything can be achieved, that his live-action stuff is so uninspiring. Here, everything is flat, the conversations unnatural, and most of the heavy emotional lifting is explained rather than felt, probably because of the condensed 90-minute runtime. This is too big of a story to fit in such a confining time frame, and each story struggles because of it. I do believe there’s another great movie in Stanton and we’ll see it someday, but it’s likely to be in the world of animation.
In the Blink of an Eye is streaming now on Hulu via Searchlight Pictures.
