Certain warning signs might signal a film’s poor quality: calendar release date, lack of promotional materials, a lack of press screenings, late embargoes, a late premiere in a festival. A critic’s duty is to push these aside in the sincere hope that they’re wrong. Readers might think critics relish the opportunity to hate on a film, but it’s simply not the case. We are spending our time—in the case of this one—traveling to Park City and braving the cold and long lines to attend the premiere. We wish for our time to be well-spent, for our senses to be awed every time we sit down and the lights dim.
With In the Blink of an Eye, no senses are awed—the warning signs proved correct. Andrew Stanton’s second live-action feature after 2012’s John Carter stands out only as an immensely dated, hyper-polished film that purports to be a celebration of the human spirit but in actuality leans heavily on the idea that technology will save us all. We should embrace AI—worship it, even. This dated perspective is likely due to its 2016 Black List script from Colby Day. Much has changed in the landscape over the past decade. However, the best narratives look at timely topics with prescience. For instance, HBO’s Silicon Valley is set in an adjacent world and holds up beautifully seven years since its finale.
In the Blink of an Eye tackles three separate narratives, intercutting between each. We open in 450,000 BC, where a family of Neanderthals struggles to survive. In the present day, Claire (Rashida Jones) works at a university excavating the bones of an ancient man who we presume to be one of these Neanderthals. Then, in the far-flung future, Kate McKinnon is Coakley, the only passenger on a massive space station headed to some far-off planet hundreds of years away. She communicates only with her station AI system Roscoe, and the two share a quippy relationship that draws to mind Spike Jonze’s Her—again, pointing to a decade-old script.
In 2024, a romantic fling between Claire and Greg (Daveed Diggs) gets off to a bumpy start. It’s not that Claire doesn’t like Greg—she’s just hyper-focused on her research. She could be published, she tells her mother excitedly, but life has other plans: her mother gets sick and she’s forced to move back home to Canada, leaving the coveted research position behind. From there she leans on Greg for emotional support as the two begin a long-distance relationship via computer screens. The presentation of this relationship could easily be reworked into a Google or Meta commercial illustrating how their technology connects us even in the worst of circumstances. But their interplay is sincere, and Diggs’ performance stands out as a statistics student who loves Claire despite finding her to be a tough nut to crack, or more likely because she is such a tough nut. Years later, when Greg uses the Internet to figure out how he should talk to her teenage son after discovering he’s been watching porn, this also could be a ChatGPT commercial on how their product assists parents at their most helpless.
Stanton, known for work in the Pixar universe, directs live-action à la animation. Cutesy visual jokes that would be at home in any Pixar movie are the norm, e.g. Greg telling Claire that, no, he wasn’t sleeping when she calls him up on a late video chat, but quickly takes out his retainer when she’s not looking. The Neanderthal section is In the Blink of an Eye‘s best, with proper life-or-death stakes and a perspective that humans—or those who would eventually develop into humans—still find time for humor, sports, and art, even when the brunt of their precious hours is otherwise spent in desperate search of fulfilling Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.
Movies don’t need to possess perfect science, and a certain “movie logic” is permissible to keep narrative wheels spinning. But they must exhibit some semblance. The future storyline’s central conflict arises when an unknown parasite infects the station’s open-air plants that are solely responsible for the ship’s entire oxygen supply to the precious cargo (human embryos). It becomes impossible to overlook that there would exist zero contingency plan for a possible contamination on what seems like a massive operation costing unknown trillions of dollars and immense resources. A sacrifice is required and, later, walking through the area where Rosco was once housed, the humans say, “Thank you, Rosco,” as if giving a prayer of thanksgiving to this AI. In the world of In the Blink of an Eye, technology has replaced God. It’s played straight but can’t help reading as deeply pessimistic. A lingering suspicion persists that the writer-director of WALL-E has made a covertly cynical sci-fi film that presents technological progress as our savior on the surface, but in actuality, deeply evil at its core. Yet that is too much of a leap; there is not enough evidence, even on its fringes, to support this more generous read.
Other narrative and thematic elements conflict. When humans develop the ability to live forever in the near future, it’s presented as a celebratory breakthrough. While Claire is immensely proud of her son who led this research, she still chooses to die at a natural age because, according to her, that’s what makes us human. The film strangely refuses to explore this conflict between her son’s stated worldview and her own, either directly or indirectly. Matters aren’t aided by In the Blink of an Eye‘s polished look. The aesthetic doesn’t take the Fincher mode, which pushes against pulpy source material; it’s instead lacking personality in every conceivable way. Wall-to-wall music ensures you’re aware of the narrative grandeur on display, lest one forget.
In the Blink of an Eye is 2026’s first true dud, but distributor Searchlight’s parent company Disney is likely okay with the results, since Stanton has also directed one of the year’s forthcoming surefire hits in Toy Story 5. Studios granting in-house filmmakers the ability to pursue a passion project with seemingly unlimited means is an aspect of the industry that has produced some of cinema’s greatest, most idiosyncratic work. It’s a shame Stanton used his blank check on this script, the ideas of which seem in direct opposition to the sharper critiques he aimed at technology in WALL-E and, presumably, his next outing, with a central enemy reportedly “screen time” for children.
In the Blink of an Eye premiered at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival and arrives on Hulu on February 27.