TL;DR: Andrew Stanton’s long-delayed sci-fi epic In the Blink of an Eye spans Neanderthals, present-day academics, and future space colonists, but despite ambitious themes and a talented cast including Rashida Jones and Kate McKinnon, it never finds emotional gravity. Visually competent yet narratively baffling, it’s a sweeping concept that collapses under its own weight.

There’s a very specific kind of disappointment that only a long-delayed sci-fi epic can deliver. It’s the cinematic equivalent of waiting three years for your AAA video game preorder, watching the trailers frame by frame, building elaborate Reddit theories in your head, and then booting it up only to realize the NPCs have more personality than the main characters. That’s exactly where I landed with In the Blink of an Eye, the new Hulu sci-fi film from Andrew Stanton, the Pixar legend behind Finding Nemo and Wall-E.

Yes, that Andrew Stanton. The guy who made a robot love story so emotionally devastating I still can’t hear “Put On Your Sunday Clothes” without tearing up. The filmmaker who gave us a clownfish odyssey that somehow made ocean currents feel like mythic destiny. So when I heard he’d been quietly working on a sweeping, epoch-spanning science fiction epic shot back in 2023 and only now surfacing on Hulu in 2026, I was ready for ambition. I was ready for weird. I was ready for another swing-for-the-stars moment like John Carter, but maybe with tighter gravity.

Instead, In the Blink of an Eye feels like a half-rendered Pixar animatic that accidentally escaped into live action.

A 45,000-Year Cold Open That Sets the Tone

The movie opens 45,000 years ago on a jagged shoreline, where a Neanderthal man named Thorn, played by Jorge Vargas, climbs a rock for reasons that are never clear. Food? Curiosity? The ancient urge to do something questionable for no discernible payoff? He slips. He falls. He lands with a bone-crunching squelch that’s meant to remind us how fragile early human life was.

I get the symbolism. Existence is precarious. One misstep and you’re done. But it’s hard not to see the metaphor applying to the film itself. Shot in 2023 and delayed for years before finally arriving on Hulu, In the Blink of an Eye has had the cinematic equivalent of a wobbly climb up a sharp cliff face. And from the opening scene, I could feel the grip slipping.

Stanton is nothing if not ambitious. The movie attempts to trace the sweep of existence from prehistoric survival to far-future space colonization, hopping between timelines like a kid channel-surfing through the History Channel and a mid-budget Black Mirror knockoff. On paper, that’s the kind of audacious sci-fi storytelling I live for. In execution, it’s baffling.

Three Timelines, Zero Gravity

The core structure of In the Blink of an Eye weaves together three narratives. The first follows the Neanderthal family: Thorn, Hera, and Lark. Their language is unintelligible, their names appear in title cards, and their aesthetic sits somewhere between museum diorama and Halloween cosplay. I kept thinking of the Geico caveman commercials, which is not the vibe you want when you’re chasing cosmic profundity.

The second timeline is contemporary. Rashida Jones plays Claire, an anthropology professor studying Neanderthal remains. Her work is framed as groundbreaking, though her explanation to her mother on the phone—“I could publisher a paper”—is delivered with such awkwardness and riddled with continuity errors that it feels like a first draft slipped past editing. Claire’s romantic subplot with a statistics professor played by Daveed Diggs never quite ignites. They connect via a one-night stand and… that’s about it. Their chemistry is so thin I could practically see the boom mic hovering between them.

The third timeline jumps into a parodic future where Kate McKinnon plays a pilot tasked with colonizing a distant planet. She’s accompanied by an AI voiced by Jones, because why not double down. McKinnon, who I adore from her Saturday Night Live days, brings a straight-faced absurdity to scenes like flipping through a physical instruction manual titled “Settlement Preparations” as if humanity’s last hope runs on laminated binders.

And here’s the problem: none of these timelines meaningfully connect. There’s no narrative gravity pulling them together. The film gestures toward themes of love, survival, and endurance, but it never builds the emotional scaffolding to support them.

Big Bang Ambitions, Tide Pool Depth

The marketing around In the Blink of an Eye sells it as a sweeping sci-fi epic about the persistence of life. In reality, it’s a 94-minute montage of disconnected human struggle. People get sick. Antivirals fail. Babies are hatched in spaceship drawers. Relationships flicker in and out like buffering streams on bad Wi-Fi.

Stanton’s previous films thrived on emotional specificity. Wall-E worked because the loneliness was tactile. You felt the dust. You felt the silence. Here, everything feels abstract. The Neanderthals are the closest the film gets to something primal and compelling. Their struggle to make fire, their tentative family bonds, their bone flute wonder—these moments hint at awe. Real awe. The kind that makes you imagine what it felt like to hear music for the first time under a sky unpolluted by satellites.

Ironically, the farther the film moves into the future, the less it feels alive. The techno-optimism of the final act, with its verdant alien planets and clean white spaceship corridors, feels like a corporate screensaver version of hope. It’s the kind of future that looks great on a Disney investor slide deck but lacks soul.

A Sci-Fi Epic Without Wonder

Good science fiction doesn’t just ask big questions. It makes you feel the weight of them. Think about Interstellar’s time dilation gut punch or Arrival’s linguistic heartbreak. Even Stanton’s own Finding Nemo had stakes rooted in parental panic and oceanic terror.

In the Blink of an Eye gestures toward existentialism with a Sylvia Plath quote about the immediacy of now, but it never grounds that idea in lived experience. The editing between timelines feels less like a deliberate mosaic and more like someone shuffling a deck of half-finished scenes.

And the tone? It hovers in an uncanny valley between earnest and accidentally comedic. McKinnon’s presence almost pushes the future timeline into satire, but the film never commits. It’s not funny enough to be camp. Not profound enough to be epic. Not tight enough to be a character study.

As a longtime fan of Andrew Stanton’s work, that’s what stings. This is a director who understands visual storytelling at a molecular level. Who knows how to make silence sing. Here, the silence just sits there.

Technical Craft, Emotional Void

To be fair, the production design isn’t incompetent. The prehistoric sequences are textured, even if occasionally cosplay-adjacent. The spaceship interiors are sleek. The visual effects are competent. But competence is not transcendence.

The score swells when it’s supposed to swell. The camera lingers when it’s supposed to linger. Yet I never felt transported. I felt like I was watching a high-budget proof of concept for a better movie that never got made.

And maybe that’s the real tragedy of In the Blink of an Eye. It’s not aggressively bad. It’s not a trainwreck you can gleefully dissect. It’s just… flat. Limp. A sci-fi epic that moves across 45,000 years of human history without once making my pulse spike.

Verdict

In the Blink of an Eye wants to say something monumental about survival, connection, and the fragile miracle of existence. Instead, it drifts through its timelines like a ghost unsure which century it belongs to. For a director who once made me sob over a trash-compacting robot, this feels less like a bold evolution and more like a misfire lost in space.