Fast pace keeps ‘In Time’ entertaining
Time is money in In Time, starring Justin Timberlake and Amanda Seyfried. In this future society, everyone stops aging at 25 (when they’re at the height of hotness, coincidentally) and gets one year of time to “spend” trying to extend their lifespan. The super rich can live forever while the poor end up dying in the streets–yep, they’re dropping metaphors here–and someone’s got to shake up the entire system.
Thankfully, there’s Will Salas (Timberlake), a boy from the wrong side of the tracks who lives with his mother in a very modest apartment. They’re both living day-to-day, literally, and keep getting pushed further into poverty by an imbalanced system that penalizes all the people in the poor “time zones” with higher taxes, interest rates, prices and more.
One night, Will and his friend meet a man at a bar who’s holding on to over a century. That kind of time doesn’t roll into Will’s zone very often and the man is instantly at risk of being robbed by Minutemen, time gangsters who steal people’s hours, minutes and days. Will saves the man’s life and the man lectures him on the flaws to the time currency system. Why do the prices keep going up for the poor? How are people who only have hours to live supposed to earn more time? They can’t, because that’s how the system works.
Will awakens the next day to find that the rich man has committed suicide, but has deposited over 100 years of time on Will’s clock. Being new money, Will starts dishing out years to his friends and planning to cross into New Greenwich, the wealthiest time zone in the world.
His little rags-to-riches story doesn’t sit well with Timekeeper Raymond Leon (Cillian Murphy), a man who has seen too many time robberies to believe that someone would just give another person his century. Raymond tracks Will down, determined to find out how Will suddenly came into all this new time. Raymond’s dedication to his job, even after he’s seen that Will’s goal is to create equality, feels a little off. It’s established that Timekeepers don’t earn a lot and Will saves Raymond’s life at one point, yet Raymond is determined to bring him to justice? There’s no explanation of Raymond’s motivation here.
Will makes it to a casino where his risk-taking-bad-boy charm catches the eye of Sylvia Weis (Seyfried), daughter of Philippe Weis (Vincent Kartheiser), one of the richest men in the world who has so much time he can basically live forever. Sylvia is bored of her lifetime of being really, really careful–people can still die in accidents or be killed, they just don’t biologically die until their clock’s run out–and she longs to take risks and really live life like those cool, sexy, poor people who could literally die at any second. Her belief that the poor are the ones truly living feels a little patronizing because it never really proves to be false. The “glamorous” life of almost dying every few minutes seems like fun to her, but she never quite sees the reality of being that poor.
The overall metaphor of imbalance between classes and the vicious cycle of rich getting richer and poor getting poorer is thinly veiled, but somewhat effective. It’s very reminiscent of the ongoing healthcare debate. If you can afford healthcare, you can live a lot longer than someone who can’t afford it. Here, the rich have decades of boredom and excess while the poor are racing around to scrounge up a few more days.
The concept of time as currency keeps the film interesting and the pace racing. Things happen fast and Timberlake and Seyfried (who always seems to be wearing 7” heels) literally sprint through the film. The pace keeps it firmly in action movie territory and prevents it from getting too heavy or message-y, something that probably wouldn’t work in this film anyway. In Time is an entertaining ride as long as you buy in right from the get-go, otherwise you’ll end up scoffing at every time pun and underdeveloped character.
