Sumit Paul-Choudhury, online editor
(Image: Stephen Vaughan/TM and ? 2011 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. All rights reserved. Not for sale or duplication.)
Time is money, and how much you're worth - which is also how long you have to live - is written on your arm for everyone to see. Once you've passed your 25th birthday, you'll never look or feel any older - provided you can keep earning time faster than you spend it. If you're a poor kid from a rough part of town, life becomes a constant race against the clock. You never hit the snooze button; you're never late for work; and you never, ever kill time, because that might well kill you.Every second counts. So what would you do with a century?
That's the premise of In Time, the latest movie from writer-director Andrew Niccol, whose oeuvre includes a number of thoughtful science fiction films, beginning with 1997's Gattaca, set in a world of genetically-modified haves and un-modified have-nots, followed by The Truman Show, which explored the plight of an unwitting reality-TV star, and S1m0ne, which told the story of a digital actor and her Svengali-esque creator.
Like In Time, each of these earlier films uses a deceptively straightforward premise to ask questions about humanity, morality and technology. But while they were closely-observed character dramas, Niccol's new film is much more of a thriller.
Will Salas (Justin Timberlake), eking out a living in the depressed city of Dayton, sticks his neck out for a stranger and finds himself the recipient of an unexpected fortune: but, as you would expect, his sudden wealth attracts unwelcome attention from criminals and cops alike. Both the time-hoarding gangsters known as the Minute Men, and enforcers of the chronological class structure called Timekeepers, are soon on his tail.
The newly flush Will gatecrashes the wealthy "time zone" of New Greenwich, literally putting his life on the line when he bets big in a high-stakes poker game. And when he and poor-little-rich-girl Sylvia Weis (Amanda Seyfried) subsequently go on the lam, they become ticking time-bombs personified, with just hours, then minutes, and finally mere seconds to spare on their clocks. No wonder they run everywhere - although why Sylvia never sports any footwear but ankle-breakingly vertiginous heels remains a mystery.
(Image: Stephen Vaughan/TM and ? 2011 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. All rights reserved. Not for sale or duplication.)
But In Time's central metaphor offers more than just the chance to refresh tired action movie tropes. If you?re inclined to see it this way, the equation of time and money offers a powerful way to explore economic issues that would otherwise be anathema to a blockbuster movie, touching on everything from the consequences of economic inequality to the sustainability of perpetual growth. Those who live on the breadline are all but doomed to remain there, even as the rich enjoy lives of privilege paid for with their blood, sweat and tears. (?Survival of the fittest? has its now almost traditional citation as the baddy?s ethos, with poor old Darwin being misrepresented as usual.)But we should pity the affluent, too, apparently: when nothing but a nasty accident can kill you, your life ends up being very long, but also very boring. "The poor die and the rich don't live," summarises Sylvia, whose centenarian father Philippe - a dead ringer for a certain Old Bullingdonian - has earned millions (of years) by making payday loans to the poor. A brief tryst with Will is enough to make her throw over her pampered existence in favour of an outlaw?s lifestyle, rather as Patty Hearst threw in her lot with the Symbionese Liberation Army, and the two hit the road to on a mission to redistribute her father's wealth.
All told, In Time does a masterful job of dressing up social and economic messages as thrilling spectacle, moving swiftly along from one cracking set piece to another. But while copious verbal and visual puns make its potentially dry subject matter more palatable, I nonetheless found some of it hard to swallow.
It's not much of a stretch to map the plight of Dayton's working stiffs to that of their real-world counterparts: we already know that poverty can kill, even before financial restrictions on healthcare come into the picture. The atemporal setting - in which people drive muscle cars that emit electric whines, but wear cravats and call each other on payphones - adds to the sense that this could very well be a world just next door to our own.
But it rings less true to be told that the one per cent lead terribly dull existences that they'd swap in a heartbeat for the, um, vibrancy of scraping to survive. (Timberlake's performance isn't quite compelling enough to dispel the thought that his real-world fortune would see him right for a good few million years in the world of In Time.) And Will?s Robin Hood act feels a bit too generically ?Hollywood? to be intellectually, as well as emotionally, satisfying.
(Image: Stephen Vaughan/TM and ? 2011 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. All rights reserved. Not for sale or duplication.)
By the end, I couldn?t help feel that the promise of In Time?s early scenes - notably a brilliantly executed world-building moment in its opening minutes - had dissolved into slick, but relatively generic mush of wish-fulfilment. For those in the #occupy camps looking for a night off, that might make it time well spent. But if you?re hoping for something a little more chewy, you might feel, in the words of my dissatisfied companion, that it?s two hours of your life you?ll never get back.In Time opens today in the UK. It is currently showing in theatres in the US.
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