You thought the ambitious, albeit ultimately disastrous failure of John Carter was bad? At least that film had a scope and scale matched for the screen compared to the horrendous In the Blink of an Eye, director Andrew Stanton’s second foray into live-action filmmaking. If anyone wonders why the WALL-E filmmaker signed on to helm Toy Story 5 in 2024, then just go on Hulu (or Disney+, if you live internationally) and press play. This thing is bad, but not compellingly awful, unlike John Carter. No, In the Blink of an Eye is practically inept in every way, despite an alluring framing device that could have repurposed this century-spanning story into something textured and emotionally devastating.
The alluring part of such a framing device has to do with Stanton and editor Mollie Goldstein finding connective threads between three stories: one set at the end of the Neanderthal Era, the other in our present-day and the third in the distant future. Instead of telling each separate story as their own anthological pieces of a larger puzzle, Stanton intercuts between the different time periods as an attempt to communicate with them (for instance, the discovery of sexual intercourse in the prehistorical era transitions to post-coital arousement in 2025), but finds very little in the process.
The Screenwriting
Each significant character is introduced through text. However, you will learn very little, if anything, about them and the world in perpetual motion which they inhabit for ninety-four painstakingly dull minutes. What tries to be a live-action version of Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi, Powaqqatsi and Naqoyqatsi smushed into a picture that never interrogates on the very nature of human life ultimately ends up being a complete nothingburger that has nothing of interest to say, thematically, narratively, and aesthetically about anyone whom Stanton presents on screen.
I could sum up the names of each character in the time periods depicted by Stanton and screenwriter Colby Day, but who cares, since none of these stories go anywhere meaningful or say something beyond “We’re all gonna die and we should accept this human inevitability”? No, really, the entire thesis of Day’s screenplay can be resumed with this giant throughline. A montage (or fancam, really) that attempts to bridge what we’ve seen in each story repeating itself through time attempts to tell us what this entire circle of life awaits. Yet, none of these have anything to impart on audiences. It feels like a Temu version of The Tree of Life, or something someone would generate on Grok, devoid of any passion, artistry, and human feeling.
Daveed Diggs: The Hulu Movie’s Only Redeeming Element
The only elements that prevent the movie from being an outright disaster are Daveed Diggs’s impassioned turn as Greg, the only human that feels like – ahem – a human, in a relationship with anthropologist Claire (Rashida Jones, in her worst on-screen performance). Their union faces many challenges when it is forced to go long distance once Claire’s mother is diagnosed with terminal cancer. If you think the film will do something with this storyline and see Claire surmount extreme grief through love, then you’d be wrong. Diggs’s performance works because he is given the most room to breathe. Everyone else falters, with Jones being the worst offender, boxed into the clichéd grief-stricken daughter who, at some point, refuses to let it become her identity and learns to love – and live – again. It’s mawkish and far too soapy to impact us, as viewers.
Diggs also brings a great comedic counterpoint to the shoddy material of Day’s script, while Kate McKinnon’s usual gesticulations falter highly in a performance similar to the one Jim Carrey gave in Joel Schumacher’s The Number 23. She portrays astronaut Coakley, who has the ability to live longer than the average human, to set up a colony of babies on a distant planet with an AI assistant named ROSCO (Rhona Rees). Again, none of these are properly defined, and you’re not going to care much about the urgent stakes of a mission like this one, despite the solid visual effects work on the Big Bang sequence and the landing of a spaceship, even if Stanton’s filmmaking lacks the grandeur of John Carter.
Final Thoughts on In the Blink of an Eye
In fact, everything within In the Blink of an Eye feels televisual, almost as if it were a miniseries that Disney execs truncated on a chopping board and turned it into the mess you’re seeing dumped on the platform with little to no fanfare, despite a Sundance world premiere. Only music composer Thomas Newman’s ethereal, almost Glassworks-esque musical score infuses some passion into this otherwise boring movie that fails to communicate or find any ideas in the three stories it haphazardly brings to the screen. The final “reveal” of it all is more convenient than meaningful, which completely ignores why these anthological films do well in the first place!
And don’t get me started on the “end of the Neanderthal era” sections, which are as bad as Jean-Jacques Annaud’s Quest for Fire and Michael Chapman’s unwatchable The Clan of the Cave Bear. It’s painfully insipid and uninspired filmmaking from a director who has made his mark in animation but cannot seem to replicate that magic when working on real-life sets with living, breathing actors. Here’s hoping the clear cash-grab of Toy Story 5 will bring him back to the standards we have come to expect from the filmmaker, provided he never makes another live-action effort ever again.
Andrew Stanton and Colby Day’s In the Blink of an Eye is now streaming on Hulu!
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