My Cultural Diet

Andrew Stanton is best-known for his work on Pixar classics like Finding Nemo and WALL-E, and he aims for something similarly ambitious with the live-action In the Blink of an Eye. Across three interwoven storylines — a Neanderthal family trying to eke out an existence in the distant past; a modern-day woman juggling career, romance, and her mother’s impending death; and a 25th-century astronaut trying to preserve the human race on a distant planet — Stanton and screenwriter Colby Day clearly want to communicate something profound à la Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life. Unfortunately, despite all of its earnestness, In the Blink of an Eye feels trite and vapid. (For example, the film’s biggest emotional moment isn’t the mother’s death, but rather, the “death” of the astronaut’s AI companion, which rings pretty false in our present AI slop-saturated age.) The Neanderthal storyline is the most well-executed but the other two storylines failed to connect on any level, emotionally, aesthetically, etc., which is ironic because the entire film is about the many things that connect us over space and time. When Slant’s Jake Cole described the film as “a commercial for life insurance that got out of hand,” he’s not wrong. In the Blink of an Eye sure looks pretty, thanks to the gorgeous British Columbia scenery, but I suspect you’ll quickly forget its profundities once the credits are done rolling.

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