‘In Time’ surprisingly entertaining
Every morning Will Salas (Justin Timberlake) wakes up he has less than a day to live. So he gets up early and looks for work to buy more time. The movie In Time is a futuristic world where time has replaced money. When you want to buy things you purchase them in units of minutes, hours, days, weeks or years. You track this time on a digital clock that runs on your arm; if you run out of time, you die. This clock starts ticking when you turn 25 years old and it gives you a year to live. After you turn 25 you can live on only if you work to buy more time. However, once you turn 25 you cease to age. Needless to say this movie has a very young attractive cast. In Time is a surprisingly entertaining film. I went into it thinking it was going to be a cheesy over-the-top action movie; and while it had its cheesy moments it was very entertaining as well as thought provoking. But would we expect anything less from writer/director Andrew Niccol, who also wrote The Truman Show?
This futuristic world is split up into time zones. You live where you have time to live. Those people who have less than a day and wake up early to earn more time live in the ghetto. The inhabitants of the ghetto are more likely to run from place to place and to fight and steal to get more time. The more successful citizens live a few time zones away where people take their time and spend their time on fancy food and fancy living. Instead of police this world has time keepers; the time keeper’s goal is to keep time where it belongs–basically so the inhabitants of the ghetto stay away from the rich.
One night Will Salas goes out with his buddy Borel (Johnny Galecki) to have a drink. One patron of the bar buys rounds for everyone in the bar. A gang of thieves catches wind of this and shows up to steal this man’s time; he has over a hundred years on his clock. While everyone else runs off to safety, Will Salas saves this man’s time and his life. While hiding out, the man with 100 years on his clock states he has lived for 105 years already and that no one should be immortal. The two fall asleep, but Salas wakes up alone to find he has 100 years on his clock. He looks out the window to see the man on a bridge; he runs out of time and falls to his death. At this point Salas decides to head to New Greenwich with the people rich in time to find ways to take their time and distribute it back to his community. The time keepers however won’t allow it and the action of the film picks up.
In Time is as much an action movie as it is a social commentary. The people with all the time hold it over the heads of those without it. They offer loan services like banks, they separate themselves from the people with little time and they do everything they can to make sure the people with little time never make it out of the ghetto. Those with a lot of time would rather see people die than give away their own. This film seems to make some bold statements about class warfare and supports the idea that the rich get richer while the poor get poorer.
The only questions the film left me asking were about the fact that this film was set in the future. No one had cell phones and the cities also seemed very un-futuristic. I’m not saying I wanted flying cars, but if you set your film in the future you have some definite advantages. The only thing that made it seem like it took place in the future was the fact that they used time as currency and the clock glowed from under their skin. This movie also seemed to take itself very seriously, but it also seemed to take advantage of as many time analogies as they could; those cheesy lines added a bit of humor for me but I thought it was needless. I would recommend you see this movie in a theater with a group of people as there were multiple parts that left the audience cheering.
