good, could have been great!

Rating: 6/10 (24 December 2011)

Time is money- our parents used to say, and in an era of declining personalization and increasing digitization some of us still bow in reverence to that farsighted thought. In Time takes this concept a step further, to a cacotopian earth, where time IS everything indeed, including money. And it is this subsumption that makes the movie distinct, and watchable.
In this world, through genetic technology, everyone stops aging at 25, and from that moment they have 1 year to live. Their life henceforth can be extended if they are able to conjure up deals, trade-offs or of course, crime. And this earth too like ours can provide for everyone's need but not everyone's greed (Gandhi). Hence this presumably utopian society has similar set of problems- an even deeper rich-poor divide where the poor live in ghettos, amid a life of crime and misery, and on borrowed time, while the rich live in opulent mansions, ride swanky cars, and have literally, all the time in the world.
The first scene in the movie presents one of the biggest fallouts of this theory- that a 30 something Olivia Wilde playing mother to, well, a 30 something Justin Timberlake. The people here are born with a digital clock in their hands which tells them exactly how much time they have left to live, which, when over, leads to sudden death. This is all a ploy to maintain balance in the world- "for a few immortals, many people must die"- as one protagonist explains. In this carefully orchestrated world of orderly chaos, Justin Timberlake is Will Salas, who when falsely accused of stealing time from someone rich, starts a chain reaction which ultimately brings down the system.
It would be foolish to read between the lines in this type of an alternate world movie- just how does one keep track of global time supply? How can exchange of time, and in essence life, happen just by holding someone's hand without putting into play the intent of the person (which means a criminal doesn't need a gun to kill you, just hold your hand)? And it is fairly obvious that there wasn't a lot of budget to play with in this movie.
But what matters here is the amount of thought and detail that the director has been able to put into the story, which is good when it starts, mediocre in the second half, when the film resembles a version of Bonnie and Clyde, with Timberlake and Amanda Seyfried turning modern day Robin Hoods. And while there is not an iota of doubt that both of them look pretty all the time, there is a shocking lack of chemistry and interest in the movie on their part. In other words, they mostly sleepwalk through their role- begs the question, were they paid money for this, or time :P
This year has given us some grand movies- superheroes, aliens, superspys, witches and warriors, all with mega budgets, 3D renditions and little thought. But In Time is perhaps the years first science fiction movie that has some originality, and makes you sit up and cogitate, and in that, the movie is just IN TIME, before the year ends :)