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A cheap, lifeless, and hyper-sentimental mess of a sci-fi movie that feels like something Grok might spit out if Elon Musk asked it to simplify “Cloud Atlas” into a story he could understand, Andrew Stanton’s deeply unfortunate “In the Blink of an Eye,” starts by pasting a Sylvia Plath quote over footage of a horny caveman, ends with a maudlin Rashida Jones monologue about how wonderful it is that everyone dies, and so flagrantly wastes the 89 minutes in between that it leaves you even more resentful of your own mortality than you were before it began.
Spanning more than 47,000 years in its search for a single believable moment, this misbegotten piece of “everything is connected” slop isn’t just significantly worse than the “WALL-E” director’s previous foray into live-action filmmaking (the infamous “John Carter” fiasco of 2012), it’s bad enough to make you long for the days when Hollywood was willing to risk embarrassing itself at that scale.
That $284 million bomb was a byproduct of a time when studios were shooting for the moon in hopes of landing a global audience back on Earth. This straight-to-Hulu misfire, which looks like it was funded with a Rocket Loan for $6,000, is the tragic epitome of an era when mega-corporations like Disney have come to regard movies as glorified commercials for their streaming platforms, and tend to afford those projects the money and developmental resources to match.
Truth be told, I’m not much interested in trying to figure out why a brilliant visual storyteller like Stanton has struggled to translate the genius of his animated films to a brick-and-mortar film set, as I struggle to imagine any filmmaker being able to ground the “what does it all mean?” wistfulness of Colby Day’s screenplay in a place of real human emotion (also the author of last year’s “Spaceman,” Day is a fine writer of high-concept ideas, but this script reads more like a statement of creative purpose than a proper display of his talent). Still, Stanton’s efforts to do so leave a lot to be desired.
Earlier I mentioned that “In the Blink of an Eye” starts with Sylvia Plath and a horny caveman, but I was lying: Technically it starts with the Big Bang, which at this point is about as fresh and exciting to see rendered on-screen as the murder of Bruce Wayne’s parents. And the caveman, whose name is Thorn (Jorge Vargas), isn’t horny quite yet as far as we can tell. First the grunting Homo Neanderthalis is seen trying to spark a fire; it’s not until a few moments later that we see him giving his lady (Tanaya Beatty as Hera) the business as their daughter Lark (Skywalker Hughes) stares into a fire.
From there, “In the Blink of an Eye” indulges in the first of its many, many cute but contrived time-jumps, as we cut forward to a bed in Princeton, New Jersey where a handsome adjunct professor (Daveed Diggs) is humping away at a post-doctoral student (Rashida Jones). Some things never change! Her name is Claire, and she’s obsessed with the mRNA she scrapes from Thorn’s fossilized skeleton in her lab. His name, she thinks, is Greg, and he’s obsessed with Claire.
The fucking doesn’t go very well, so Claire whips out her vibrator as soon as Greg scampers out of her apartment — the whirring of her sex toy forms an auditory bridge to the 25th century, where the longevity-enhanced Coakley (Kate McKinnon) is 210 years into a 336-year solo mission to repopulate a distant planet known as Kepler-B, with only her AI co-pilot Roscoe for company (the program is voiced by Rhona Rees). All has been going well inside the Ikea-like confines of Coakley’s visually uninspired spaceship (which is almost as dull as the design of her outfits), but things take a turn for the worse when the plants she relies on for oxygen begin to get sick.
Like absolutely everything in this movie, that sickness is repeated across the other parts of the story, as Thorn is wounded by a fall and Claire’s non-character of a mom falls ill from movie cancer. In “In the Blink of an Eye” (which, like all movies that start with the word “in,” is hard to work into a sentence without committing a grammatical war crime), every dramatic beat is hit three times in slightly different form with an obviousness that nullifies the need to see them more than once.
Such a clear and consistent rhyme scheme is meant to reflect the recursive nature of our universe, but it can’t help but feel like more of a bug than a feature when applied to a film whose characters have all the depth and personality of the people in a car commercial. When one couple has a baby (for example), we can readily extrapolate what reproduction might entail for the other two, and watching “In the Blink of an Eye” stumble in smaller and smaller circles towards the inevitable doesn’t layer its points so much as sand the truth off of them. Things only grow harder to swallow when the movie pivots away from concentric circles in favor of drawing straight lines, as the material connections between its three parallel stories — most of them even more labored than Claire’s aforementioned fascination with Thorn’s bones — are too eye-rolling to achieve even a manufactured twinge of faux-profundity.
The only meaningful connection made over the course of the movie is the one between its actors, whose inability to salvage their material does more to braid them together than any of the machinations of Day’s script. The cast from the Neanderthal segment get off relatively easy, as they at least get to speak in an unsubtitled language and cover their bodies in animal fur. Jones and Diggs aren’t so lucky. Both performers are entombed within a romance so generic that it barely registers when their story begins skipping forward in time; it’s hard to overstate just how much funnier and more alive a quick shot of Diggs removing his retainer on a Zoom call is than anything else in this movie, but rest assured the difference is vast. And poor Kate McKinnon, whose unbothered snap-and-fingergun affect is all wrong for a solitary role that no one would have been able to save from seeming like a second-rate WALL-E, but here makes it impossible to buy into the stakes of her mission, even when Coakley and Roscoe talk ad nauseum about oxygen levels and mission failure rates.
The point, we’re told in no uncertain terms, is that life’s meaning is found in the fact that it ends — that seeding the universe with evidence of our existence is a more beautiful thing than it would be to stay alive forever. Indeed, the film’s characters so beatifically embrace the idea that, by the 25th century, civilization has invented and retired the tech required for near immortality, leaving long-haul pilots like Coakley the only people who still feel compelled to use it. It’s a nice thought, I suppose, but every disposable moment of “In the Blink of an Eye” would seem to suggest that what we do in life won’t echo in eternity. It might not even inspire any interest on Hulu.
Grade: D
“In the Blink of an Eye” premiered at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival. It will be available to stream on Hulu starting February 27.
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