Life in the USSA

Rating: 10/10 (26 July 2017)

I just saw "In Time" again for the third time or so, and it's my new favorite movie. It's hard science-fiction, much harder than most. The future doesn't look like "the future" at all, but more like the 1970s. The cops drive 1970 Dodge Chargers, not goofy electric golf- carts. There are phone booths, no cell phones, and the Internet is not a major force in anyone's life. No one is emigrating to Mars, as in "Gattaca (1997)" -- also written by Andrew Nicol -- and there are certainly no star-ships, and no space aliens. The single technology that has gone forward is medicine, and that life clock thing, naturally. "No one dies; no one gets sick." That's the thing that makes it "hard" science-fiction; it resists throwing a bunch of stuff on the wall, instead holding tightly to its premise.
Because of the immortality-with-a-price premise and the 1970s action-movie styling, comparisons to "Logan's Run (1976)" are unavoidable. Whereas "Logan's Run" envisioned a future where we got everything we ever wished for, only to see it wind down, "In Time" envisions a sort of stagnant future that one rarely imagines in a movie, not even obviously dystopian, just stagnant. This is what I love about the movie: it's not really about immortality at all, but about Economic Fascism. In the movie, people have jobs making widgets, making just enough to live day to day. Prices are methodically inflated so that no one gets ahead. There's no upward mobility whatsoever. It's like "1984", except Economics (with the help of that clock thing) does all the work of the secret police. It's a metaphor for our modern post-2008-crash economy.
This movie reminds me a bit of "The Island (2005)", which I also liked, a big difference being that there's no "secret". The characters in "In Time" tacitly consent to their situation.
This is a fast-paced, beautiful action-adventure science-fiction film with a brilliant premise, destined to be a cult classic. Hollywood, please make more movies like this.