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While presented as a trio of interconnected stories, “In the Blink of an Eye,” the latest film from “WALL-E” and “John Carter” director Andrew Stanton, plays more like three disparate TV series smushed into a single feature. Two of these tales — one set in the present, another in the far-flung future — are mawkish, malformed melodramas that circle the drain of hard sci-fi without getting their hands dirty. The third, set in prehistoric times, is dazzling in its simplicity and dramatic rigor, and could’ve easily done without the others. That the three appear in combination, crisscrossing until they cancel each other out, is incredibly frustrating.
The movie opens with the origins of life on Earth before fast-forwarding to a patch of seaside wilderness in 45,000 BC, an era marked “the end of the Neanderthal age” by accompanying text. Here, we meet a family of proto-humans who are, implicitly, the last of their kind. The patriarch, dubbed “Thorn” (Jorge Vargas), is gravely injured in a fall, and is cared for by his pregnant wife “Hera” (Tanaya Beatty), and their adolescent daughter “Lark” (Skywalker Hughes), while they also look after a newborn son.
After a hard cut to the present, we’re introduced to driven anthropology researcher Claire as she begins an awkward, friends-with-benefits relationship with eager statistics student Greg (Daveed Diggs). Just as swiftly, the timeline jumps forward several centuries and boards an interstellar vessel, upon which an astronaut named Coakley (Kate McKinnon) shepherds human embryos bound for a nearby planet, with the help of her A.I. computer system, ROSCO (voiced by Rhona Rees).
Within its first few minutes, the film introduces and subsequently solves several mysteries about how these characters are related. A family heirloom — an acorn — shows up both in the Neanderthals’ moving story, and as a fossil in Claire’s research, which seeks to find a “missing link” in our DNA that might prolong human life. In the future, Coakley, it turns out, is hundreds of years old, her lifespan having been artificially lengthened so she can seed life on another planet. You can see where things are going, and while the screenplay by Colby Day (“Spaceman”) coyly tilt-shifts the eventual answers, the questions of how these stories are connected aren’t all that interesting to begin with.
This is primarily because the stories themselves (the present and future ones, anyway) are a bit of a drag. Claire and Greg develop a relationship, while Claire navigates her mother’s critical illness in a different city, a hurdle that mostly takes the form of phone calls and text messages that relay the drama logistically, instead of emotionally. “I’m sad,” says one message, which is not-so-subtly superimposed with Coakley making a frowny face. McKinnon, unfortunately, isn’t equipped to carry the drama of her space-faring section, in which the numerous plants on board begin to succumb to a mysterious pathogen. Although she makes an effort, she can’t quite shake the gesticulations and verbal emphases that have defined her comedy career, resulting in severely mixed tones.
Both of these sections suffer from flat filmmaking that relies on drama that’s largely told, rather than felt. They gesture toward technology as coping mechanisms for either a grief we rarely see or a sense of isolation the movie has no time to let us feel, as Coakley converses with her AI assistant before having to consider taking it offline. As she stares wistfully at a HAL 9000-like display, “In the Blink of an Eye” begins to verge on parody.
Each time the movie cuts back to its prehistoric section is a welcome relief. The scenery is resplendent. Thomas Newman’s otherwise mechanical score takes on fluid, untamed qualities. The characters’ spoken language is unfamiliar, but passionate, and the performances are driven by pure intent that beams through their heavy prosthetics. It slowly amounts to a harrowing tale of love, loss, discovery, and perhaps even the primal origins of art and cultural rituals. It is, in a word, beautiful, and makes for a meaningful inquiry into life’s joys and its fleeting nature.
However, each time this tale progresses, the movie cuts away once more, to one of two stories that try desperately to express these very same themes, but crash and burn in the process. The plots are connected by characters confronting death and mortality, but only in the most technical sense. For the Neanderthal family, the emotional stakes are at a constant peak. For Claire, however, the tale of her mother’s illness takes a backseat in a head-scratching ways, despite the movie affording Jones the fascinating conundrum of trying to conquer death itself. It isn’t long before her story stops being about this completely — in fact, it stops being about anything at all, until an out-of-nowhere third act turn that may as well belong to a different movie about the passage of time. Were it not for the fact that Day’s script was written before “This Is Us” began airing, it might have felt like an ill-considered copy.
By the time Coakley’s story similarly becomes about time, the film has no emotional fuel left in the tank, and no way to keep track of how time actually affects its characters in the present or future stories, reducing their experiences to mere montage. As for our ancestors in the past: they’re left at the mercy of their far less interesting descendants, whose verbose declarations of the movie’s themes supersede not only the Neanderthals’ riveting nonverbal saga, but the film’s own ethical non-dilemmas over its life-expanding concept. Both as drama and as science fiction, “In the Blink of an Eye” doesn’t probe these questions, but rather, drops definitive answers like anvils, leaving little room to ruminate, wrestle, or consider.
English (US) ·