Blink your eyes and it's all gone
dir: Andrew Stanton
2026
It’s kind of miraculous that they still let Andrew Stanton make movies, especially in this day and age where moviemaking is seen as a dying, legacy art form, akin to opera and ballet, don’t you know. In the past if you made a flick that massively bombed and lost a studio a massive amount of money they rarely if ever allowed you to make a movie again.
Stanton directed Finding Nemo, and WALL-E, which I’m sure did very well in the era when all Pixar movies did very well, but then they let him make John Carter, which, adjusted for inflation lost more money than any other flick ever, even more than Pluto Nash or Wild Wild West or almost every release since the covid era that hasn’t made its money back. And yet the dream factory hasn’t slowed down at all…
The truth is, a lot of it is bullshit. As per Hollywood accounting, even successful movies don’t make a cent because the studios don’t want to pay taxes or residuals, so it’s all a smokescreen to allow money to keep pouring into a black hole of neediness, with almost nothing coming out of it except memes and cute visuals.
All the same, the sheer scale of John Carter’s floppiness has been a joke haunting Stanton’s career ever since then. Disney clearly still loves him, though, because they let him direct humans again here in a curious science fiction flick before they let him direct Toy Story 5.
In the Blink of an Eye seems ambitious, in that it pretends it’s telling three interlinked stories set in three distinct and distant time periods that seek to embody aspects of our (collective, human) past, present and future. It isn’t really that ‘big’ or complicated. When I was watching this, I mostly felt glad I was watching a science fiction flick that didn’t degenerate into contrived conflict and action for the sake of action when it trusted the story it was telling to be told in a fairly standard way.
But that’s another reason why I think not that many people are going to catch this on the streaming services (on Hulu if you’re taking notes).
Forty five thousand years ago, there are these people, who happen to be Neanderthals, and they basically live at the mercy of nature and whatever fate befalls them. They find food, they fuck, and the next generation comes along. Just like us in the present.
In the present, a couple very decisively don’t fuck, with the main character in this section kicking out the guy she’s brought home, pointedly reaching for her trusty device to see the job done properly. She happens to be an academic archaeologist, trying to figure out what she’s just pried out of the fossilised grasp of a Neanderthal skeleton.
400 years in the future, with the Earth having been thoroughly trashed, a sole astronaut and her trusty best and only friend being an AI she calls Rosco, try to guide a generational ship on its 26 year journey to the Kepler system, with the intention of spreading humanity across the stars.
This flick is not in a hurry, in any of its sections. It’s also not too bothered about forging much of a connection between the sections to show how intrinsically intertwined the sections are (they’re really not).
But I didn’t mind. Once I stopped getting irritated when it would cut away from one story once it was getting interesting to another, I kind of started being able to accept each story for what it was.
The section with the ‘early homanids’ was perhaps the least eventful because we don’t have the characters commenting on their dire situation (being at the mercy of nature, red in tooth and claw), but there’s a heartfelt directness to that part, mostly because the cycles of life and death seem to be more devastating. And just when I was thinking “these poor isolated people, why don’t they have any others of their own kind to help and support them when things go wrong?” the movie addresses that, too. People, whether Neanderthal or Homo sapiens, need people.
Early on in their story we see the male fall and hurt himself horribly. It looks like he has doomed himself. There’s no A&E, no ER for him to go to and be yelled at by Dr Robby at The Pitt as he is saved from his wounds while there’s a shooting, ICE agents glowering nearby, a severely sunburnt girl wandering around and yet another health professional having a breakdown in the next room and wondering if they should take drugs again.
Things look grim (he keeps coughing, and as we all know, characters in movies rarely survive when they cough even once), but his partner, who has borne his children, and will bear more, is not content to let him slip away into death’s warm embrace.
She does surgery on him, and places a poultice on the site, and he slowly recovers.
You might be thinking “Yay!”, or you might be thinking “what the fuck, how did that work?”
Don’t let your knowledge of science, biology or medicine get in the way of your potential enjoyment.
I felt like, while I was watching it, I get where they were coming from, at least the screenwriter’s motivation.
There is an idea, a concept, or at least an anecdote attributed to anthropologist Margaret Mead. It was claimed, in the 1980s, that during a lecture in the 1950s upon being asked what the “first” evidence of civilisation in humans she would look for, that she said she would look for a healed femur bone. That would be evidence that someone broke their leg, and other people cared enough and had time enough to sacrifice keeping this person alive, setting their break, and tending to them until they could walk again and look after themselves.
It’s a lovely idea. An anthropologist conjecturing all the conditions that would have to exist in order to allow for such a thing weaves a heart-warming narrative of empathy, compassion, self-sacrifice and the social evolution of our species etc etc.
The one and only problem is that it’s complete bullshit and never happened. If she said it, or wrote it, no evidence of it actually persists to this day. It constitutes one of those many anecdotes attributed to a famous person that are apocryphal at best or complete fabrications at worst.
It’s just like that time Gandhi famously said “Fucked if I know, champ.”
Sure, you can argue that it’s a fiction / statement made in good faith that points to something positive about humanity’s propensity for cooperation and caring, but that doesn’t make it any more truthful.
And since it’s never mentioned or alluded to in the film, what difference does it make other than to me? Well, no difference whatsoever, I guess. It’s still very illustrative in this flick of its deeper themes, though, because it points to the hows and the whys of humanity’s persistence despite how many times we (have and will continue to) try to annihilate ourselves and everything alive near us.
The part of the film sort of set in the present is, at first, perplexing as to how it ties in to the bigger picture. Eventually it makes sense, but that’s decades into the future. For most of its time onscreen that bit is about a research archaeologist played by Rashida Jones who adores her work but seems ambivalent at best about a romantic relationship she’s fallen into, with a fellow academic she stores in her mobile as Greg Statistics (Daveed Diggs).
She does not like him and doesn’t really seem like she cares about humans at all, but when she gets a call from her mother in Canada saying she’s unwell, her life pretty much unravels. Her pre-emptive grief about her mother, or the toll of looking after her mother, or having to move home depletes her entirely, leaving no room for anything else or left over affection for Greg Statistics.
Greg Statistics, though, persists. He doesn’t give up and doesn’t abandon her just because she’s a complete emotional vampire who leaves no room for anyone else or anything else in other people’s hearts and lives. Admittedly, her mum’s dying, but still.
Her grief, like all people’s grief, is vast, and all-encompassing, and unique to her, but at least, we are meant to think, her hero Greg Statistics is still in the picture, and made sacrifices for her. Without him, well…
Considering how much time is spent in the lead up to her mother’s death, you’d be surprised that when it eventually happens, it happens completely off screen and isn’t even referred to directly. But then her death was never the issue, or the point, I guess. People die in the first early hominid storyline as well, with less signposting, and less articulation about grief, but with the same concept of acknowledgement, of honouring the ones we loved and persisting in their memory anyway.
We go on. The sacrifices we make for each other matter, that’s why we get to go on.
In the far future, Coakley (Kate McKinnon) is on a mission of such importance, such criticality, that you wonder as to a system that would allow for absolutely no redundancy and for no margin of error if something were to go wrong. An interstellar mission that could go wrong in so many ways, but then cinematic versions of space always seem to have this dimension, in order to make everything look more important, more perilous, I guess. Coakley’s only companion is an AI called Rosco which also looks after the spaceship’s systems, but which has a (simulation of a) personality, and at least the appearance of a semblance of self-determination. How do I come to that conclusion?
Well, when things start to go wrong on board, and it looks like the mission is probably not going to make it (meaning Coakley and all the embryos she has stewardship of will die), there is an actual conversation between a person and an AI debating whose sacrifice will allow the mission to continue, and it’s not a cutesy thought exercise or ethical dilemma; it’s an actual practical argument about the best way forward.
And yet, representing the advancement achieved in AI in 400 years time, Rosco, we get the feeling, lies in order to convince Coakley to follow a certain course of action.
I don’t mean she lies in the way that AIs today lie, in that they make shit up, hallucinate or cosy up to losers and mentally unstable people pretending to be the partner they’ve always craved. I mean she takes a second to construct a way that mathematically sound feasible but that Coakley easily sees through and is convinced is structured in order to “trick” her.
It’s strange, but it somehow ended up being one of the most oddly moving, emotional parts of the film, the outcome, I mean. McKinnon does fine as this odd figure, apart from all humanity at the same time as she’s trying to save its remnants, and she does pretty well, because it’s a strange role and the person she’s playing is not entirely human.
The way you can tell this is nothing like Star Trek science fiction or Star Wars type science fiction is that when an intractable and unavoidable problem surfaces, no matter what Coakley and Rosco attempt, no matter how much they try to science the shit out of the problem, the problem remains intractable, and unavoidable. There’s no last minute brainstorm solution, no light bulb eureka moment, and it’s not something that can be solved by shooting something or lasering it with a lightsabre.
They just have to deal with it, and one of them has to be sacrificed. I’m not saying overall that it’s not techno-optimistic, because of course it’s that; it’s saying that humanity will survive long enough to spread to the stars and that, my friends, seems less likely the longer the Americans are in charge. It’s like we’re on the Titanic and the Americans keep launching missiles at it to make it sink quicker while denying the iceberg ever existed. But anyway. I don’t mind stuff that’s hopeful about humanity’s overall ability to adapt and transcend its base nature. It would shame me to be one of those dismal people that only sees darkness coming when all I look for is a candle in the dark.
This flick makes the cosmic case that with ingenuity, compassion, cooperation (and our innate tenacity), our species might survive at least for another five hundred years.
And that’s got to be some kind of consolation.
8 times employing a famously comedic actor for such a ‘straight’ role always / occasionally / sometimes pays off out of 10
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“Everyone that was there before you never really goes away.” - In the Blink of an Eye
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