Full disclosure: I was thoroughly prepared to be “underwhelmed” by In Time. After all, when a movie is hyped as being “BRILLIANT,” “MIND-BENDING,” “EPIC” and such, I’m expecting, at least 2001: A Space Odyssey, Alien, or Inception, not a movie whose producers are being sued for plagiarism.
(Harlan Ellison says In Time bears striking similarities to his Hugo and Nebula Award-winning story “Repent, Harlequin! Said the Ticktockman.” In Ellison's story, every time you’re late a proportionate amount of time is deducted from your life; be late too many times and the Master Timekeeper (whom everyone called “the Ticktockman, but never to his mask”) activates a device called a cardioplate, which stops your heart. This seems to be what’s happening in this movie, too.)
Perhaps a lawsuit against the filmmakers should also include the estates of William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson, Victor Hugo, whoever owns the rights to Robin Hood, David Newman and Robert Benton and... writer/director/producer Andrew Niccol himself.
Sometime in the future, a way is found to stop aging. Once you reach twenty-five, as one character says, that’s the way you're going to look for the rest of your life. But there's a catch: on that 25th birthday “your clock starts running,” a digital display on your forearm that counts down the last year of your life—unless you can gain additional time. But with time being the new currency (four minutes for a cup of coffee, one minute for a phone call, a discount store where everything costs “99 seconds...”) the poor literally live from day to day. But the rich have all the time in the world.
Will Salas, a “ghetto dweller” befriends a rich man who wants to die because he feels the system isn't right. He gives all his time—over a century—to Will with the admonition “Don't waste my time” and allows his “clock to run out.” After Will's mother dies unnecessarily and armed (literally) with over a hundred years, he heads for New Greenwich, where all the rich folks live, to “make then pay.”
That’s about the extent of Will’s plan when he is captured by the Timekeepers (like the ones in Ellison's story) who confiscate his time. He escapes, taking the daughter of the richest man in the sector (maybe even the whole world) as hostage. Demanding 1000 years ransom, Will's new plan, like Robin Hood's, is “stealing” time from the rich and giving it to the poor. When the ransom is not paid, his “hostage” becomes his confederate and like Bonnie and Clyde (in Newman and Benton's movie) they start robbing time banks, pursued by a humorless, relentless, incorruptible Timekeeper (a man very much like Les Miserables' Javert).
In Time is essentially a mash-up of Nolan and Johnson's Logan's Run (where at age 30, people participate in a lottery to live longer and everyone else at the three decade mark is expected to “make room” for the next generation) and the director's own Gattaca (where the genetic elite rule over those from the shallower end of the gene pool). The script is intelligent but offers no real surprises and does have a couple of (to me) major flaws:
One is the concept time = money. After a while the substitutions (“Flashing that much time will get you killed,” “How many of my years do you want?) begin to sound like Smurftalk (You know, where “smurf” becomes an arbitrarily-used universal adjective, as in, “This Smurftalk is getting on my last smurfin’ nerve!”). The other flaw is this world (like the one in Gattica) works better as metaphor than “reality.” If you lived in a world where you were constantly reminded how much life you had remaining, how much time would you “waste?” Would you really hang out in a bar as if you had all the time in the world? If your bus is five minutes late—five minutes of your life that you literally will never get back—and they charge you five minutes for the fare… Isn’t that charging you for the same thing twice? Shouldn’t it be like a pizza guarantee, “On time or it’s free?” And forget about that cable appointment sometime between “eight and eleven…” Wouldn’t everybody be so time-conscious that they’d all be hopelessly neurotic?
Still, I am surprised to find myself recommending In Time. It’s not a Christopher Nolan/Duncan Jones class-movie; it’s “clever” but not “challenging.” You could make a worse investment of 00:00:00:00:01:49:00* of your time. If you saw Cowboys and Aliens, Rise of the Planet of the Apes or one of the “Green” movies, you already have.
*The display from the movie: years, months, weeks, days, hours, minutes, seconds.
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