The film’s time-jumping triptych of storylines from screenwriter Colby Day resembles Cloud Atlas streamlined by way of Robert Zemeckis’ Here, scrubbed of Tom Hanks. Around 45,000 BCE, a Neanderthal couple (Jorge Vargas and Tanaya Beatty), inexplicably identified via onscreen text with cutesy animation-level names Thorn and Hera, struggles to raise their family somewhere on a picturesque but still sometimes dangerous coast. In 2025 and beyond, anthropology grad student Claire (Rashida Jones) grapples with her mother’s mortality while hesitantly embarking on a relationship with fellow student Greg (Daveed Diggs). And 400 years further into the future, Coakley (Kate McKinnon) is the only human on a spaceship, in charge of safeguarding a group of embryos intended to populate a distant planet that’s being prepped for their eventual arrival.
There are more formal connections between these three storylines—implied at first, then outright stated, then underlined by the time the movie’s 94 minutes are up. Moreover, the editing weaving them all together is remarkably listless; none of the scenes last long, but there’s no internal Terrence Malick-like rhythm or early-Paul-Thomas-Anderson force of montage behind their clunky juxtapositions. Sometimes In The Blink Of An Eye manages a cute match between similar sounds (phones or alarms buzzing across centuries) or images (we see a Neanderthal handprint; cut to Claire dusting a fossilized hand), like a rudimentary melody emerging from a musician playing scales. That’s as much momentum as Stanton can gather, mistaking lurching ahead for hurtling forward. It’s not a great sign for your grief-based subplot when scenes aren’t completely clear about whether the subject of that grief has actually died yet.
Two patterns do emerge from these stories. One is the remarkable uniformity of bad acting across time periods, particularly in the post-Neanderthal scenes. Sometimes repurposing a typically comic actor for more straight-faced means can be devastatingly effective; Stanton appears to be operating under the assumption that just doing it at all is most of the battle. Jones and McKinnon share a directness as performers, Jones on the more grounded side with McKinnon typically more outlandish, and as a result neither of their characters ever convey any hidden depths as the material skitters across the surfaces. (Also, to cast a mid-forties Jones as a grad student, in a movie that purports to be mindful of our time limits as humans, and never mention her age seems like a missed opportunity, or maybe just flat-out miscasting.) The characters are always saying more or less exactly what they’re feeling, and the performances have no second level. They barely have a first level; they’d feel more at home in a TV anthology sponsored by a tech company belatedly blundering into the streaming-content game.
Which brings In The Blink Of An Eye to its other, even less endearing pattern, one that feels like a signal beamed straight from Pixar’s Silicon Valley origins. With plot points about Coakley’s friendship with the A.I. system that helps manage the spaceship, a crucial mission to colonize a new planet, revolutionary technology allowing for defiance of human aging, and the supposedly tremendous job that Claire does homeschooling her child, In The Blink Of An Eye reads like a jumble of notecards at some rambling tech-bro keynote. Specifically, it comes across as surprisingly Elon-Musk-coded. There’s standard lip-service paid to the meaning of life being found in its limitations and permanence residing in the continuity of the human race, yet the movie seems to elide a whole-ass dystopia that emerges somewhere between Claire and Coakley’s stories—not to chill the audience or fold it into a larger philosophy, but to shrug it off as inevitable. Just another quirk in the crazy, beautiful tapestry of life. What’s really missing isn’t another storyline so much as any sense of genuine human interaction. This especially voids the incoherent relationship between Claire and Greg, which features what may be the first Pixar-alumni depiction of a vibrator while still coming across as profoundly skittish about sexuality.
In The Blink Of An Eye deserves a little credit as a genuine passion project; it’s not the kind of movie anyone makes without full belief in its profundity. Stanton doesn’t need this project to burnish his assured legacy as a major creative force behind some of the most beloved all-ages animated films of the past 30 years. (He doesn’t even need this Hulu premiere to have a successful 2026; he also directed Toy Story 5, the surest of sure things, coming in a few months.) On the other hand, no one who’s seen The Tree Of Life, Cloud Atlas, Here, or any number of self-important TED Talks needs it, either.
Director: Andrew Stanton
Writer: Colby Day
Starring: Rashida Jones, Kate McKinnon, Daveed Diggs, Jorge Vargas
Release Date: February 27, 2026 (Hulu)
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