'In the Blink of an Eye' misses the irony
Wordy titles are ill-advised anyway, but “In the Blink of an Eye” represents especially poor judgment for a film with all the forward momentum of a plant. Or a fossil. Or a rock. A lot of the objects in this exhausting, embarrassing dud, actually, which is already semi-melting my brain to attempt to recall.
Spanning tens of thousands of years on (really) and off screen (unconfirmed), the terrible and terribly acronymed “ITBOAE” includes three storylines, with “story” being a relative term: In 45,000 B.C.E. a family with names like Thorn and Lark deal with pregnancy and injury quite a long time before modern medicine; in 2025 Claire (Rashida Jones) works on groundbreaking anthropological research and figuring out if her drunken hookup Greg (Daveed Diggs) is anything more, especially when her mom is diagnosed with cancer; and in 2417 Coakley (a badly miscast Kate McKinnon) soars on a very, very long journey in space to start a new civilization with babies born in the ship’s microwave. (Don’t ask.)
Combining the amateur prologue of “Materialists” with the psychological insight of AI fortune cookies, director Andrew Stanton (“Wall-E,” “John Carter”) and writer Colby Day (“Spaceman”) stretch their arms around the mysteries of life and declare a whole lotta nothing. This is one of those movies that suggests a reckoning with big ideas about life and death, change and time, but does so with three inert plotlines — imagine ordering a beer flight where everything tastes lousy, and you’re bummed every time you return to each of them — and a total disinterest in taking ideas beyond generic notions of caring and loneliness and struggle in all eras.
Jumping years at a time and managing to be both pretentious and comically bad, the film has one intentional laugh (Greg claims he wasn’t sleeping when Claire calls on Zoom, then quickly takes out a night mouth guard when she looks away) and several unintentional ones, which should not be taken as an endorsement to stream. With so much we can analyze about the simultaneous fast advancement of technology but arguable slow progress of human social development (at least lately), this drama feels wrong for the moment and no deeper than a T-shirt reading “Children are our future.” It doesn’t understand why problems persist or how small and large achievements happen; the movie just sits back and marvels blandly at the enormity of time while fumbling to connect with the experiences at hand.
I know “In the Blink of an Eye” wasn’t sitting on the shelf for nearly 20 years, like someone’s old, failed attempt to update “2001” even though they hadn’t seen it in decades. Still, I haven’t seen “Wall-E” in a while and now need to check if “ITBOAE” was playing whenever the humans in the 2008 film were sitting around watching junk.
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