Imagine the first two lines of Whitney Houston’s mawkish hit “The Greatest Love of All” on a loop for an hour and a half and you’re part way to experiencing Andrew Stanton’s decades-spanning compendium movie. Unfolding with all the urgency of an early 2000s screensaver, it takes a big swing at life, the universe and everything in a bid to pay some kind of tribute to the laws of evolution that keep the human race alive, at least for now. To Stanton’s credit, it’s not as long and awful as Cloud Atlas, the film it mostly closely resembles, but the concept that links the three stories linked together here is too obvious — and too long in the unveiling — to sustain interest in its three, very different strands.
Like that weird, trippy interlude in Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life, In The Blink Of An Eye begins with a brief history of time, accompanied by a pithy, literary line: “Remember, remember, this is now, and now, and now.” Well, it’s certainly a cause for concern if you’re getting your inspirational slogans from Sylvia Plath, but the writer’s quote does explain the film’s ambitious structure, taking place in three very different timelines that, just as you might imagine, exist in the now and show many happy correlations with the present. Neanderthals and people in the future who live for hundreds of years — they’re just like us!
Indeed, the first stop-off we make is in 45,000 BCE (Before Common Era, apparently), where a primitive man called Thorn is busy providing for his wife and child. This is by far the dullest section of a film that, even at the best of times, excels at being inoffensively unexciting, which means that just when we might be tiring of Thorn and his family, we are politely summoned to 2025. Here we meet Claire (Rashida Jones), an academic anthropologist who is forensically examining an ancient but well-preserved corpse that could — even though it mostly likely isn’t — be the famous Missing Link.
Claire is having an affair with someone called Greg from “Statistics”, and their very modern, will-they-or-won’t-they storyline is the cinematic equivalent of negative equity, which may be why we are quickly flung into the year 2417. Here we meet Coakley (Kate McKinnon), in the part of the film that plays Silent Running to the first part’s Quest for Fire. Coakley is a “longevity enhanced” human being who has been charged with establishing an off-world human colony for her ship’s cargo of unfertilized embryos.
I know what you’re thinking: what could possibly happen next? Well, reach for the Xanax, because a mysterious plant disease has invaded Coakley’s greenhouse, an environment that, quite categorically, shouldn’t allow for outside pathogens. Yet here we are, and the disease is busy gobbling up the plants, while back in 2025 some woman is seeing a bloke she may or may not be all that keen on, and, even further back, in pre-history times, a prequel to Sasquatch Sunset is unfolding. It’s tough to be mean to a film that has its heart in the right place, but it beggars belief that, having been sent briefly to Director’s Jail with the middling John Carter, its director would expect a film as woolly and sentimental as this to take him anywhere except backwards, to Director’s Siberian Gulag.
Title: In the Blink of an Eye
Festival: Sundance (Premieres)
Director: Andrew Stanton
Screenwriter: Colby Day
Cast: Rashida Jones, Kate McKinnon, Daveed Diggs, Jorge Vargas and Tanaya Beatty
Distributor: Searchlight Pictures
Running time: 1 hr 34 min
English (US) ·