In The Blink of an Eye: A Hollow Sci-Fi Feel Good Drama

Premiering at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, director Andrew Stanton’s In The Blink of an Eye is an ambitious sci-fi drama that, despite its stellar cast, is just a bunch of empty platitudes. What audiences would describe as merely fluff, it may have its heart in the right place, but dazzling special effects and a powerful score are not enough to distract from its lack of profundity. When all is set and done, the film offers up yet another overly simplistic tale about the resiliency of the human race featuring little to no imagination or nuance. Telling the story of the arc of the human race, it fails to paint a complete picture in largely omitting the bad parts of that story and not delivering characters worth going on that journey with. Taking place over three different stories spanning thousands of years, the characters filling each story essentially exist to fill out their respective time periods and stories. The point is how these stories are meant to be connected, supposedly leading into one another, but that connection is tenuous at best. One scene of little consequence after another, the result isn’t necessarily good or bad, it’s just boring. Focused on its premise first and foremost, everything else is secondary and it certainly feels that way here. In these troubled times, it is good to be reminded of what humans are capable of. However, this experience would have benefitted from a little more effort than failed emotional manipulation.

As mentioned, In The Blink of an Eye is an interwoven triptych tale that contemplates the resilience of humanity across three moments in time, the past, the present, and the future. In the past, a Neanderthal family is displaced from their home, leaving them  to struggle to survive the ups and downs and protect their children using only their set of primitive tools. Meanwhile, in the present, Claire (Jones), a determined post-graduate anthropologist studying ancient proto-human remains who comes across the remains of the aforementioned family, and also begins a romantic relationship with Greg (Diggs), a fellow student. Finally, about two centuries after that, Coakley (McKinnon), the sole custodian of a spaceship headed for a distant planet who, along with a sentient AI, contend with a mysterious disease that is attacking the ship’s oxygen-producing plants that help produce the oxygen for the new home of the  human race. Jumping between the three storylines, other than what connects them, they have very little to offer. Working better individually than as a whole, the Neanderthal storyline is a visual one that is ultimately held back by a language barrier. Where it works the best is in through Easter eggs in the present storyline that Claire encounters in her studying. Beyond her work, the film would fumble its attempt to give her a life outside of academia with Greg by making it more complicated than it needed to be.

With its sole focus on those empty platitudes, this feel good story on paper amounts to a feel nothing story despite of the efforts of Jones, McKinnon, Diggs who do their best with the material, but were essentially all a means to an end. In what is more about the underlying message than the pieces that help illustrate it, less cynical audiences may be more moved than others who will see the film for what it is, finding themselves simply rolling their eyes at the derivative cliches and tropes, and wondering the point of it all. Going about another hopeful story about hope, the meaning of life, and the connections we share with one another in such a long winded way, while not bringing anything new to the table, in such a long-winded way, its relatively short 94-minute runtime will feel longer at times. For what  the film may lack in substance, it makes up for in style. Taking full advantage of the Vancouver, British Columbia scenery, the cinematography is beautiful and the accompanying score impart the film with emotion that the rest of the film fails to deliver. That being said, it was not without its moments. The chemistry between Jones and Diggs does much of the heavy lifting in their section, similarly, McKinnon carries her section of the film with her comedic timing.

In The Blink of an Eye fails to fulfill the promise of its ambition, built on an emotionally bland story built on empty platitudes, that a strong cast and a powerful score could not quite save.

still courtesy of Searchlight Pictures

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Keith Noakes

The EIC of the coincidentally-named keithlovesmovies.com. A Canadian who prefers to get out of the cold and into the warmth of a movie theatre.