PLOT: A trio of stories involving a family in the Neanderthal era, two academics (Rashida Jones and Daveed Diggs) in 2025, and a solo astronaut several hundred years later trying to save the human race.
REVIEW: Here at JoBlo, we were pretty big fans of Andrew Stanton’s John Carter. While it went down in history as a flop, it was a better movie than its reputation suggested. As such, many of us have been eager to see his live-action follow-up, In the Blink of an Eye (in the intervening years, he returned to Pixar for Finding Dory and directed a lot of TV). While the fact that the movie is only getting a Hulu release via Searchlight is a bit disappointing, a new Stanton movie is always an event—especially considering that he directed one of the greatest science-fiction movies of all time, Pixar’s WALL-E.
Sadly, In the Blink of an Eye is a bit of a slog. While only running ninety minutes, the film isn’t as profound as it no doubt aims to be, with all three tales offering nothing you haven’t seen done before—and the fact that each of them only gets about thirty minutes or so to play out makes any emotional investment hard to pull off. Only one of them—the deep space section with Kate McKinnon—actually works.
The first story, about a Cro-Magnon family trying to survive, aims to change perceptions about this step in human evolution, showing them as empathetic and as intelligent as the Homo sapiens that eventually replaced them on the evolutionary chain. Jorge Vargas and Tanaya Beatty play leaders of a family who find themselves constantly at odds with the unforgiving elements. This small story is meant to show us where we come from, with the 2025 section representing where we are, and the future one being where we’re going.
The 2025 section is easily the weakest of the three, with Rashida Jones and Daveed Diggs not entirely convincing as two Princeton academics in love, with Jones playing a post-doc in anthropology examining artifacts left behind by the Cro-Magnon family in the other section. Jones and Diggs are good actors, but they have no time to develop any chemistry, and I never bought that her driven academic—who’s suffering a family tragedy—and Diggs’s statistician were ever truly in love, given the thin material they’re given.
Of the three stories, by far the most compelling revolves around an astronaut named Coakley, played by Kate McKinnon, who we learn is the last surviving human. It’s made clear that in the future, the genetic code has been cracked, allowing humans to become virtually immortal, all of which seems to have led to the downfall of civilization. She’s a long-term astronaut who’s been on a mission for three hundred years to populate a new planet, with only the ship’s sentient AI to keep her company.
This part of the movie should have been the entire film, as I’m sure it played a role in getting the script by Colby Day onto The Blacklist. The relationship between Coakley and Roscoe (the AI) has more heart than anything else in the film and poses some interesting questions about humanity’s evolving relationship with technology. Yet again, it’s given short shrift, as any time her story gets intriguing, the film cuts away to the Cro-Magnon family or Jones and Diggs. It’s a shame, as McKinnon delivers a subtle performance that merits more attention than it will get due to the limited footprint the film will make on Hulu.
It’s too bad Stanton’s movie doesn’t work, as it’s clearly well intentioned, and the two other stories—which seem extraneous—do come together with the third in a satisfying way in the climax, but it takes too long to get there. Still, it’s beautifully shot by DP Ole Bratt Birkeland, with a good score by Thomas Newman. Even though I didn’t care for it in the end, I can’t say it’s not worth a free watch when it hits Hulu, as it may resonate more with viewers at home than it did for me here at Sundance.
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