The Edges of Humanity: Film Review of In the Blink of an Eye
★★★
Illustration by Michael DiMilo
By Geoff Carter
One of the great overarching themes of literary thought when I was a student, an ideology that has since been overshadowed by postmodernism, postcolonialism, new feminism, poststructuralism, and deconstruction—all advances that served to include marginalized populations in the literary canon—was that humanity is eternally bound by universal human experiences, that birth, death, love, hope, family, loss, and renewal are all elements in this vast human panorama that has existed across continents and over vast millennia of time.
While bringing marginalized voices into the spotlight has been a profound and necessary shift in inclusive thinking, the classic ideology of linked humanity has persisted in modern literature and film.
Andrew Stanton’s In the Blink of an Eye uses a triptych structure depicting three groups of people separated by tens of thousands of years linked by several unifying threads to underline their—our—commonalities.
The first segment portrays a family “somewhere near the end of the Neanderthal Period, about 45,000 B.C.E. While the characters speak to each other, the viewers are not offered a translation. Even so, what happens to them is easy enough to understand. Subtitles tell us the male figure is Thorn (Jorge Vargas), his mate is Hera (Tanaya Beatty) and their daughter Lark (Skywalker Hughes). Like many families today, their life is a day-to-day struggle punctuated by little joys and great disasters.
The second segment takes place in 2025. The main character is Claire (Rashida Jones), a somewhat neurotic anthropologist who, by studying relics of the past—specifically a Neanderthal fossil, is hoping to unlock secrets of longevity. While working on her fellowship, she meets up with Greg (Daveed Diggs) a statistics student. The two start (fitfully at first) a romance that turns long distance when Claire’s mom is diagnosed with cancer.
The final segment, taking place in an intergalactic spacecraft in the 25th century centers of Coakley (Kate McKinnon), who is tasked with delivering the stem cells of twenty human embryos to a distant planet in the Kepler system for colonization (although their intention or the reason for their departure is never made completely clear). Claire’s only companion is ROSCO, the shipboard AI, there to help with the mission.
Colby Day’s ambitious screenplay does a marvelously surprising job of linking these stories in totally unforeseen but beautifully logical ways. By intercutting from one segment to another intermittently, Day and Stanton not only underline the implicit commonalities of the three groups of people, these two provide evolving views of family, socialization, and technology. While attempting to do this is ambitious, it also runs the risk of being cliché and even a little maudlin. Themes of peace, love, family, hope, and unit can rapidly become devolve into saccharine simplicity that sometimes results in a gooey feelgood movie experience.
While In the Blink of an Eye does take on these big, beautiful themes, it avoids becoming the syrupy affirmation of family values seen so often in these sorts of films. By establishing concrete links between these three families, Day and Stanton provide a backbone of logic and science to make their point.
Technology is one component highlighting the evolution of the human condition. Thorn and his neanderthal family are totally isolated at the beginning of the film. They hunt and gather only for themselves. When disaster strikes, they are completely on their own, but when they become—almost accidentally—become folded into a social group, their life improves.
Claire, whose brittle personality is tempered by her relentlessly good-natured boyfriend Greg, uses social media as a shield to guard herself from intimacy after they begin a physical relationship. She screens her calls and uses texts as excuses not to stay overnight, but then when she is forced to move away, it becomes the foundation of their relationship. Claire’s phone is also her only lifeline to her mother, who lives half-a-continent away. Distance has become abbreviated, allowing relationships to become extended.
Technology reaches an apex in the third installment. Coakley, whose lifespan has been genetically enhanced in order for her to complete a two-hundred-year space mission, has only ROSCO (voiced by Rhone Reese), an AI onboard computer, as a companion. She and ROSCO seem to have a good working relationship. The AI entity is an encyclopedia, a science lab, an analyst, a colleague, and a consultant. She even has a sense of humor but when disaster looms, she does not at first seem to grasp the human implications of the situation., but while working with Coakley and reading her responses, ROSCO makes a decision that is ultimately more human than anyone would have a right to expect.
It’s difficult not to compare ROSCO with HAL of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Both are omnipotent and omniscient beings ruling over their starship kingdoms, but their paths toward achievement of human emotionality diverge widely. One is ambitious and evil. One is not.
The specter of technology in recent films like Companion, Ex Machina, and some episodes of Black Mirror examine what constitutes the ephemeral essence of humanity and whether it can exist amidst the transistors and circuits of a machine. In this particular film, technology and science provide tools to help unlock the nature of humanity, not the means or the ambition to destroy it.
While the linking devices work extremely well in this film, there is a sense of being rushed, particularly near the conclusion. Huge leaps in time and circumstances compress the storyline and condense the characters into somewhat stereotypical essences of themselves. Expository material, like the life choices of Claire and Greg’s son, is glossed over in one or two short scenes.
It’s been suggested that this project might have been better suited to be an extended limited series, a format that might have allowed it to dive more deeply into character development and the technological arc that led to Coakley’s Kepler space expedition.
Director Andrew Stanton’s previous works include animated features Finding Dory and WALL-E (which also deals with issues of human dependence on technology), and the optimism and happy endings found in many American animated features also seems evident here. In the Blink of an Eye offers a particular view of the history of the world—a humanist history that demonstrates a human linkage across time, space, and even—surprisingly—biology itself.
Unfortunately, the acting in the film is uneven. Kate McKinnon acquits herself as Coakley extremely well, although it would have been nice to see more of her. Rashida Jones is uneven as Claire, although it’s difficult to tell whether her inconsistencies in character arise from the screenplay or her performance—in either case, I found it difficult to like her. Daveed Diggs turns in the most fluid performance as Greg, and the rest of the supporting cast acquits themselves sufficiently well.
In the Blink of an Eye is a good film, but it could very well have been a great film, if it had been given the opportunity to more fully develop themes of individualized unique human experiences rather than broadly general ones. The Coakley sequence in particular would have benefitted from being a more fully developed story. Still, this is an engaging watch and a clever take on the never-ending and ever-changing human condition.
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