Racing the Clock

Rating: 7/10 (29 December 2011)

"In Time" (2011), Rated "PG-13" for Adult Situations, Adult Language, Brief Partial Nudity, Violence & Mild Gore. Running Time: 1hr&49mn - Three Stars (out of Four)
As I watched "In Time," I was reminded of Ray Bradbury stories of yesteryear, the kind you were assigned to read in junior high and/or high school. All those sci-fi "moral of the story" tales were similar in theme: an outlandish premise about a dystopian future which is really a social commentary on caste cultures and the human condition. This latest Justin Timberlake vehicle succeeds in taking those ingredients and borrowing contemporary social dilemmas straight from headlines to tell its story.
The film opens in the year 2161, where the human aging process has been stopped at age 25 for everyone. Each person has a glowing digital "lifeclock" visible in their left forearm tracking the time they have left before "timing out" to death. Time is distributed via tactile contact from person to person and from time boxes. Starting at age 25, people automatically have their clocks are turned on with only one year to live. For a price you are able to live indefinitely. The well-to-do don't give this a second (pun) thought, as their wealth enables them to live years and centuries. They can even accrue and grow more time. The impoverished must work as drones in factories to earn minutes and days to add to their lifeclocks. The urgency of earning more time to maintain your life is crucial. As one character puts it best: "You generally don't sleep in."
This makes for an attractive-looking society. People over the age of 100 are indistinguishable from people in their mid-twenties. Based on what I saw on the silver screen, I suspect the physical appearance of humans has been altered too. After all, everyone's mother and daughter all look like supermodels straight out of Victoria's Secret while the men all look like they should be on the cover of GQ Magazine.
Will Salas (Timberlake) is a working class joe who lives with his mother (Olivia Wilde) in the ghettos of Dayton. A personal tragedy sets Will's crusade in motion to bring down the system to change the status quo for all those in the lower class "time zones." Will's cause is further aided when he is inadvertently helped by a suicidal wealthy benefactor, who transfers over 100 years of life to Will before timing out.
Time is the only currency in their world. With it, people can buy whatever they can afford in days, weeks and years. Whether it is a hotel suite or high performance automobile, they pay with time. Will's newfound fortune raises the suspicions of Timekeeper Raymond Leon (Cillian Murphy, "Inception") who believes Will is a thief and murderer.
Will escapes from his ghetto time zone to the wealthy time zone of New Greenwich in pursuit of a wealthy businessman (Vincent Kartheiser, TV's "Mad Men") who built his fortune by holding the keys to immortality. After romancing his daughter Sylvia (Amanda Seyfried, "Big Love") and eventually kidnapping her, Will returns to the ghetto to show Sylvia the plight of those less fortunate than her. Soon, Will and Sylvia are robbing timebanks and sharing hundreds of years with the working-class all while being pursued by Timekeepers with decade-long bounties on each of their heads.
"In Time" isn't astonishing or great cinema, but it is a fun sci-fi popcorn thriller. The present day messages about social inequity ring true. In reality we have people in various social classes, in some cultures even castes, around the world struggling to make ends meet on a daily basis. These themes are as old as time. Does the movie clamor on the edge in the political arenas debating the redistribution of wealth? Is it designed to generate awareness of global poverty? I'll leave that for the viewer to discern.
Originally, the release for "In Time" was nearly blocked by sci-fi author Harlan Ellison who alleged it was stolen from one of his short stories. Upon seeing this film, Ellison backed off, though he did receive a screen credit for "The Terminator" (1984) when he made a similar claim on that film. Like I said, "In Time" felt like those grade school dystopian fables we grew up with, so maybe there is no reinventing the wheel on how to dress up a message and make social statement. I'm sure Ellison or Bradbury were not the first writers to do so. Look at Shakespeare, he did it before those guys. Going further back, how about that story about Oedipus? Shocking what Sigmund Freud said what that was really about!
"In Time" is a nice evening at the movies. Not amazing, but pleasant and likable enough to carry you through to its conclusion. There's some convincing acting, good action and it also works as a chase movie too. The film makes some relevant observations and is highly timely (pun). You can never have too many films that entertain you and make you think a little bit in the process. "In Time" does those things well.