“In the Blink of an Eye” Review: Ambition Without Cohesion

It’s been a month since I finished my first run at Sundance, and I’m finally getting the chance to see some of the films I missed as they began to premiere.  One of those films is “In the Blink of an Eye,” which is available on Hulu.  The film is directed by Andrew Stanton and written by Colby Day.

The first image in the film does not showcase a cosmic spectacle but rather blunt mortality.  Forty-five thousand years ago, a Neanderthal man (played by Jorge Vargas) climbs a jagged rock along a violent shoreline.  There is no exposition or guiding narration—only the sounds of wind, water, and instinct.  He slips, and his body crashes against the stone with a sickening finality.  One moment, he is alive; the next, he is extinguished.  This sequence highlights the fragility of existence and foreshadows the film’s trajectory: ambition reaching upward and momentum collapsing downward

After a prolonged delay, this 94-minute film finally begins, but its broad scope unfortunately burdens it.  The narrative spans prehistoric survival, contemporary academia, and a distant future of planetary colonization.  A Sylvia Plath epigraph promises immediacy: “Remember, remember, this is now, and now, and now.” While the film does remember, it rarely makes us feel.

The prehistoric storyline follows Thorn, Hera, and Lark, with their dialogue untranslated and their names provided through title cards.  The staging occasionally resembles a museum diorama, yet these scenes possess a primitive gravity that is lacking elsewhere.  There is danger here, mystery, and a suggestion of awe.

The present-day storyline centers on anthropology professor Claire (Rashida Jones), who studies Neanderthal remains while navigating a tentative romance with statistics professor Greg (Daveed Diggs).  Their connection feels skeletal, and scenes drift without building momentum.  Emotional stakes are implied rather than dramatized.

In the speculative future, a colonization pilot (played by Kate McKinnon) embarks on a mission to seed life on a distant planet, accompanied only by an artificial intelligence companion—also voiced by Jones.  McKinnon’s disciplined restraint adds gravity to her performance, though moments involving sterile instruction manuals and procedural briefings come dangerously close to unintentional satire.  The film addresses themes of extinction, disease, and rebirth in declarative bursts but never fully animates them.

Ambition is not the issue; science fiction thrives on scale and risk.  As Stanton demonstrated in “John Carter,” sweeping imagination and earnestness can overcome early dismissal.  However, in this film, the expansive scope overwhelms the narrative’s cohesiveness.  The timelines do not intertwine; they fragment.

Ironically, the earliest humans feel the most immediate.  In their silence, the film approaches transcendence, while its sleek futurism ultimately settles for abstraction.

Final Grade: C-

“In the Blink of an Eye” premieres tomorrow on Hulu.