Sort of like Gattaca rebooted, but nowhere near as good

Rating: 4/10 (16 July 2012)

NO SPOILERS IN FIRST SECTION.
When I first saw the previews for this film, I thought the premise was interesting. But I was afraid the idea wouldn't be fleshed out and would end up being shallow. So I waited for the inevitable cable release before watching it. Unfortunately, my first impressions turned out to be correct. Sci-Fi and Fantasy revolves around the suspension of disbelief. In a good movie, this happens for the viewer without much conscious thought as the "rules" of the universe are set forth through the telling of the story. But throughout this film I kept having to mentally will myself not to think too hard about the lack of background for the story. If you're the type of person who watches a movie and you can't help thinking "the characters wouldn't DO that in that situation" or "if X thing is possible in this future setting, then why would Y still be an issue," then I wouldn't recommend that you watch it.
The movie ended up reminding me a lot of Gattaca - except Gattaca was much better. It wasn't until reading another review that I realized that the same writer did both. That makes a lot of sense in hindsight! Well, re-hashing of ideas happens all of the time. This can be easily forgiven if the execution and presentation is good/dynamic. But this simply wasn't.
Here are a few other non-spoiler tidbits. Justin Timberlake was so-so in the movie. Amanda Seyfried is pure captivating eye candy, especially with red hair. She was one of the few tiny bright spots. But she wasn't given much to work with. None of the characters in the movie were very deep at all, so it was hard to empathize with their plight or their motivations.
SMALL SEMI-SPOILERS BELOW!!!
To expand on the generalizations I made above, here are a few things I kept thinking as I watched In Time.
There was almost NO background as to how/when/why the entire finite body-time mechanism came about. The level of genetic engineering that would be required to have a in-body time system functioning like that is astounding. With a simple thought and contact with the skin, people transferred exact seconds, minutes, days, etc. YET, there are zero safeguards built in to such a sophisticated system? I can see if someone is holding a gun to your head and makes you consciously transfer over your time. But they can just take it when you're asleep, with no effort? People can take it against your will, making it tick off your last digits and your conscious thought can't stop it even knowing you'll die in a couple of seconds if you don't? You'd also think that the time would be tagged somehow at the nano level, where at least law enforcement would know where the time came from. I mean, they have giant display screens that show them exactly how much time is in each zone. Basically, there were so many things that would require such a high level of technology to even make work at all, and yet there we so many other things that were super primitive even by today's standard of technology. The movie just wasn't consistent with things like that at all in my opinion. It didn't even try to offer any sort of explanations for those things either so I could attempt to keep my disbelief suspended.
Police cars straight out of the 70's eh? Security cameras and handguns that wouldn't be out of place today. But perfectly controlling the human aging process so you are 100% natural until the precise instant you turn 25 and then you freeze there FOREVER, no problem. Glowing bio-luminescent numbers on your arm that you could control with a mere thought and whose ending up on all zeroes INSTANTLY makes all of your bodily functions cease, sure thing. Bah, it just didn't mix or work well at all.