In the Blink of an Eye: Three timelines search for what makes us human

Andrew Stanton jumps from prehistoric caves to contemporary life to a distant spaceship bound for Kepler. The goal: find the universal human story threading through all three. Kate McKinnon, Rashida Jones, and Daveed Diggs anchor each timeline. The ambition is clear. The film struggles to earn it.

McKinnon's performance carries comedic energy but little else—her character serves plot rather than register as human. Jones and Diggs do better work, but the screenplay by Colby Day hampers them with constraints so broad that individual distinction becomes impossible. The three stories need to feel connected. Instead they feel thematic.

Ole Brett Birkeland's cinematography is competent but vacant. The prehistoric sequences illustrate concept art rather than inhabit visual reality. Mollie Goldstein's editing tries to stitch temporal registers that fundamentally resist stitching. Thomas Newman's score swells with emotional cuing, as if the narrative itself can't carry its weight.

The film's central idea: humans across vast time periods share fundamental patterns. Maybe. But the movie suggests that historical change and technological transformation reveal nothing new about human experience—that cave dwellers and spacefarers are essentially the same. This flattens history into metaphysical equivalence. It's philosophically questionable and dramatically inert.

The comparison to Cloud Atlas is inevitable. That film also reached across centuries. But Cloud Atlas reached for formal risk—genre games, narrative experiment. In the Blink of an Eye plays it safe while claiming grandiosity. That's a bad bargain.

What's frustrating: Stanton's animated films proved he understands restraint, how to suggest vast themes through small moments. Here he's abandoned that sensibility for something sprawling and abstract. The spacecraft sequences hint at what he might have done, but they feel underdeveloped.

The film mistakes scope for significance. It confuses technical ability with emotional authenticity. For all its reach across time, it feels airless. The best cinema emerges not from concepts about universal humanity but from the texture of individual lives.