Andrew Stanton has had some rough luck with the live-action filmmaking process. The director of two of the best animated films of all time, “Finding Nemo” and “WALL-E,” ventured into live-action with 2012’s “John Carter,” only for that film to be a legendarily tough shoot, reshoot, and botched release. He’s finally returned to live-action with “In the Blink of an Eye,” and, while it doesn’t have quite the messed-up story of “Carter,” it does feel like a project that truly struggled its way to Park City for its world premiere. Stanton himself noted in the intro that it was set to go years ago, only for the pandemic to derail imminent production. It finally shot way back in 2023, and is now quietly landing on Hulu in February 2026, with no accompanying theatrical release.
Sadly, one can see the rough production hampering what works about this film on multiple occasions. I’ll admit that I haven’t read Colby Day’s script, which was once on the Black List, a collection of what are considered the best unproduced screenplays, and so the deep flaws in this final product could have been there all along. But the alternately half-developed and overcooked ideas make it feel like something got lost or never filmed along the way. The final act is particularly hurried, using montage in place of storytelling, underlining the relative hollowness of a story that reaches for the stars but finds only dust.
“In the Blink of an Eye” tells three stories that are essentially set in the past, present, and future. Stanton opens his film with a family in 45,000 BC, which we are told was “the end of the Neanderthal age.” While the characters speak no understandable language, on-screen text tells us that the father is named Thorn (Jorge Vargas), the mother is Hera (Tanaya Beatty), and their daughter is named Lark (Skywalker Hughes). Hera is pregnant, and there is a newborn son named Ebb. The family forages across a gorgeously-shot landscape that sometimes recalls the origin of the planet sequence from “The Tree of Life,” but this third of the film is woefully underdeveloped on a narrative level. While it looks beautiful, and Thomas Newman’s score does a lot of heavy lifting given the lack of dialogue, there needed to be more actual storytelling beyond a few key beats of new life and tragic death.
The present gets the bulk of the screen time in Stanton’s film and centers Claire (Rashida Jones), who is working on an anthropology project that looks like it involves Thorn and his clan. As she dusts off bones that are thousands of years old, editor Mollie Goldstein cuts back 45,000 years, reminding us how connected we are as a species across so many millennia. Claire is introduced in bed with a statistics student named Greg (film MVP Daveed Diggs, who does great work to ground at least his third in something relatable), who slowly becomes Claire’s partner. It’s slow because Claire’s mother is dying back in Vancouver, which makes their initial phase a bit emotionally fraught and long-distance.
Finally, we meet Coakley (Kate McKinnon, up for the challenge of drama but underwritten), a space traveler in the 2400s who is taking stem cells that can be quickly turned into babies to a colony on a distant planet. Coakley’s only companion is an A.I. named ROSCO (voiced by Rhona Rees), who informs her partner that an infection in the plant colony providing oxygen to the ship could destroy the mission. Tough decisions will have to be made to get “the babies” to where they need to go.
“In the Blink of an Eye” isn’t just a shallow literal connection between these eras but a commentary on massive shifts in human existence. The Neanderthal Era one is made clear from the beginning, but the other two-thirds of the film also contain plot elements that won’t be spoiled but that tie these threads together under a banner of human evolution driven by emotion, commitment and curiosity.
If it sounds ambitious, you’re not wrong, but that ambition almost hampers a film that never develops characters beyond its basic ideas. At just around 90 minutes, it often feels like the Cliffs Notes version of a 500-page novel. As a film critic who also covers TV, I’m well aware of the epidemic of mini-series that should have been films, but this is the rare film that could have used an episodic structure to really build out characters, themes, and ideas. As it is, it feels too disposable for a film that, at least on some level, is trying to be about all of human history and the future of the species. And while Newman’s score is beautiful, it’s asked to do too much, too often, to fill in gaps that feel like they were never shot, if they even existed on the page.
There’s so many humanist ideas in “In the Blink of an Eye” that it becomes really tempting to give it a pass on that basis alone. How we connect to our past and our future as a species is fertile ground for sci-fi filmmaking. Whether it’s the pandemic, a rushed production, the business upheaval at Fox Searchlight, or something else entirely, that ground just never got enough water to make this work.
This review was filed from the World Premiere at the Sundance Film Festival. It premieres on Hulu on February 27th.
