In the Blink of an Eye, which premiered Monday at the Sundance Film Festival, aspires to synthesize bold scientific ideas with human emotion. Unfortunately, its execution is trite and cheesy.
In 2025, Claire (Rashida Jones) is a doctoral student in anthropology at Princeton, whose hookup with Greg (Daveed Diggs) gets serious. In 2117, Coakley (Kate McKinnon) is â…" through a space mission over 300 years to a new planet with only AI onboard with her.
Claire is studying a Neanderthal fossil that is obviously one of the characters in the B.C.E. section. The film doesn't reveal the direct connection between the present and future stories until the end but it is even more cringey.
Claire must leave Princeton to care for her ailing mother. Coakley must solve a crisis on board that could compromise her mission.
Claire's story attempts to address the balance of career, family and relationship. So it is incredibly disappointing that her story indulges in all the cliches of "women overwhelmed trying to have it all."She is so out of touch with her emotions that she lets the L word slip on a Zoom with Greg. End of life and long distance relationships are real issues that are unique to everyone who faces them, so should not be addressed with such hackneyed stereotypes.
The end of each story jumps forward many years, rendering each even more cliched. The Neanderthal story fares the best, maybe because we don't have to understand their language.
The cast performs those scenes respectably but the film does them a disservice.
Scientifically, it is noble that the film wants to correct assumptions about Neanderthals' intelligence and the missing link. The cliche stories do not show its fictional characters the same respect.
Late in the film, a character introduces concepts like changing DNA to prevent aging as if overpopulation wasn't already an issue amongst normal lifespans.
Technology in the future story is just fake. Star Trek at least had a canon that was consistent in its futuristic tech, but Blink doesn't have that kind of time to establish something believable.
The 2012 film Cloud Atlas managed to combine six stories in the past, present and future in a meaningful, intelligent sci-fi tale. In the Blink of an Eye collapses under only half as many stories.
Fred Topel, who attended film school at Ithaca College, is a UPI entertainment writer based in Los Angeles. He has been a professional film critic since 1999, a Rotten Tomatoes critic since 2001, and a member of the Television Critics Association since 2012 and the Critics Choice Association since 2023. Read more of his work in Entertainment.
