‘In the Blink of an Eye’ Review: A Time-Spanning Drama That Plays Like a Product Demo

While watching In the Blink of an Eye, it’s hard not to think about the very different skill sets required to direct a live-action film versus an animated one. Andrew Stanton, the filmmaker behind standout animated features like Finding Nemo and WALL·E—arguably two of the finest productions in Pixar’s history—makes a second attempt here to bring those talents into the real world after the failure of John Carter. And once again, it doesn’t quite work. Is there a reason those abilities don’t translate from one format to another? Where exactly does the breakdown occur?

In fact, In the Blink of an Eye—at least two of its three narrative strands—might have worked better as an animated film. If you make the effort to imagine them in that format, you start to see how they could function far more effectively than they do here. There’s something about the film’s overly ornate, borderline saccharine emotional tone that tends to be more tolerable in movies aimed at younger audiences. Likewise, dialogue that might feel perfectly natural coming from an animated character lands as oddly flat and weightless when spoken by actual humans. But Stanton chose to shoot this much-lauded screenplay by Colby Day—once featured on the industry’s so-called Black List of best unproduced scripts—in live action, and whatever modest charm it might have had mostly evaporates in the process.

The film tells three separate stories set in different time periods, connected by ties that gradually reveal themselves. One takes place at the end of the Neanderthal era, focusing on a solitary family—implied to be among the last of their kind—struggling to survive the harshness of nature. With no subtitles and spoken in an invented language, it plays out like a prehistoric survival fable with some unexpected links to come.

The second, which intersects constantly with the other two, unfolds in the present and could easily have been the entire movie, with the remaining segments serving as prologue and epilogue. Here, Rashida Jones plays Claire, an anthropologist studying fossil remains that are clearly—thanks to a telling detail—connected to those Paleolithic beings. She begins a relationship with a colleague named Greg (Daveed Diggs) while caring for her ailing mother and dealing with the pain of being unable to help her.

The third storyline—the one that most closely resembles WALL·E—features comedian Kate McKinnon in an unusually serious role. She plays Coakley, an astronaut in the 25th century traveling aboard an interstellar ship to colonize a new planet alongside plant life, human embryos, and an AI named ROSCO (voiced by Rhona Rees), a kind of empathetic hybrid between the HAL of 2001: A Space Odyssey and a highly advanced ChatGPT. Problems inevitably arise on the ship, forcing some drastic decisions.

Stanton jumps back and forth between these three threads, all of which feel as though they’ve been re-edited to within an inch of their lives, with vast amounts of dramatic material left on the cutting-room floor. Each ends up playing like a rushed short film trying to wring emotional weight out of life-altering decisions involving parents, children, and unconventional forms of lineage stretching across generations—and millennia. The final stretch of each story is so abrupt, and so oddly overcommitted to a sudden interest in the nature of time—something that hadn’t seemed especially central up to that point—that it almost feels like they belong to a sequel or a second season.

The film’s glossy, ad-like aesthetic doesn’t help matters, especially when a company CEO appears midway through to deliver a keynote-style presentation in front of an enthusiastic crowd, unveiling clips of a supposedly revolutionary invention. Without getting into specifics, the film suddenly begins to resemble the very infomercial being showcased onstage. In that moment, In the Blink of an Eye shifts from a soft, somewhat mawkish drama into something stranger: a piece of corporate-friendly branding for a vaguely benevolent yet quietly sinister conglomerate. Given the way our present is increasingly shaped by powerful billionaires consolidating more and more influence, Stanton’s film ends up feeling less like a heartfelt meditation than a bitter pill disguised as comfort. And not even animation could have saved it.