Critic Reviews

The movie’s big-heartedness is what makes it so essential and, potentially, to those not enamored by its oddball charms, so cloying. But given the state of the world, with each new day bleaker than the last, a movie that is this unabashedly sweet is something that should be treasured, protected and celebrated, not frowned upon.

Overall, there is so little texture to these character arcs that the actors are mostly just working in service of a blandly uplifting message. It’s as if they’ve all been commissioned by a well-funded science museum to lend their bodies and voices to the cause of slickly comestible up-with-people infotainment.

While it looks beautiful, and Thomas Newman’s score does a lot of heavy lifting given the lack of dialogue, there needed to be more actual storytelling beyond a few key beats of new life and tragic death.

Stanton has done truly incredible, groundbreaking things in animation, and he’s almost certainly got a great live-action film in him, but In the Blink of an Eye makes one wonder if Stanton should go a bit smaller and work his way up to such grandiose concepts like this.

In the Blink of an Eye proves yet again that Stanton is a dreamer, with an unshakeable faith in humanity. That’s not nothing.

With In the Blink of an Eye, Stanton is juggling quite a bit, including many landscapes to create and a lot of imagination for exploration. While the visuals are not exactly eye-popping, the movie is plenty serviceable.

Both as drama and as science fiction, In the Blink of an Eye doesn’t probe these questions, but rather, drops definitive answers like anvils, leaving little room to ruminate, wrestle, or consider.

It feels hurried, generalized, inattentive. There’s no specificity, no immersive sense of people actually living their lives. Again, that’s probably partly intentional. But it sure feels like a miscalculation for a movie about the survival of humanity to have so little humanity in it.

In the Blink of an Eye is a disaster of its own making, living in the shadow of far better sci-fi films of old, and never doing anything interesting with any of the ideas it throws out.

Written by Colby Day, In the Blink of an Eye attempts no less than the sweep of life from big bang to unknown verdant planets, with the emotional depth of a tide pool and the complexity of a cave painting.