In Time, starring Justin Timberlake, is a sci-fi with societal commentary that is fortuitously timed to coincide with the ‘Occupy Wall Street’ movement where protestors are chanting that they are the 99%…
In Time……?
In a simple piece of irony, confusion about preview start times ensured that I was in a panicked scramble to get into town for the preview of In Time. A feeling that made the events of the movie seem that much more real.
Unfortunately for pun haters the movie stars Justin Timberlake (JustIN TIMbElake anyone?….no?) as a poor, ghetto-dwelling son of a murdered freedom fighter who has a chance encounter that leads to him to be the focus of a police investigation. If he is not stopped it will irrevocably change the carefully managed world that they live in.
For those with a long memory, does it sound at all like Enemy of the State or The Net? What about Gattaca? (Or, if you’re as old as I am, Logan’s Run – Ed.)
Whereas the concept for those movies was ‘Big Brother’ or the enemy of unknown technology, as the title would suggest, the idea for In Time is time. In a cashless society time is currency and the population is genetically engineered with the capability to be immortal as long as they are continually programmed with enough time. Once you reach 25 your clock starts ticking and you stop aging. Rich people are immortal, poor people live day to day and once your clock runs out, that’s it. You’re dead.
It is a simple concept but it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see the parallels between the movie and real life. The line from Justin Timberlake’s character, Will Salas, that the “price of immortality is too high if even one person has to die” could easily be applied to the disproportionate distribution of wealth or food globally.
Imagine the line re-engineered to “The price of obesity is too high if even one person has to starve”. I think that is the conversation the director wants you to have when you leave the cinema but overall the movie is a little heavy handed for that. I don’t believe that there is a person who is unaware that there is a misallocation of resources in the world; it is just that they don’t have an accurate perception of how they are misallocated.
For me, that is where the movie misses the point. It is fortuitously timed to coincide with the ‘Occupy Wall Street’ movement where protestors are chanting that they are the 99% and it is those people who will identify with Will’s struggle. But it does nothing to open the viewer’s eyes to the fact that on a global scale they are far closer to being part of the 1% and that, in a seemingly cruel joke, America spends more on weightloss products than is required to feed the world’s hungry (by a factor of over 4:1).
Below: Seyfried. Not obese.
The movie was written, produced and directed by New Zealand’s own Andrew Niccol, who was responsible for Gattaca and The Truman Show, and you can definitely see his hand on it. From concept to style everything in In Time seems eerily familiar, but the problem is I think that his earlier movies were better. Gattica’s had a more believable premise (genetic engineering) and a better message (not allowing others to define your potential) where In Time says things everyone already knows in ways everyone’s already heard.
As a movie, it relied too much on cliché’s. Will Salas (Timberlake) was a down on his luck good guy who loved his Mama, so we should love him. The Cop wore a black leather trench coat, so that is how you knew whom to hate. The lady interest (Amanda Seyfried) was a spoilt rich girl who saw the injustice and wanted to do something about it so much that she was willing to give up everything at a moment’s notice because, good guy, Salas kidnapped her.
Of course her father was the epitome of everything that was wrong with society and needed to be stopped. It was all just a bit too convenient.
Overall, my money for a movie ticket comes from my entertainment budget and so that becomes my over riding criteria for judging a movie. I want to be entertained.
As much as I wanted to be entertained by this movie, as much as I like the stylized future and as much as I liked the assembled cast, I just wasn’t entertained enough to recommend people fork over their $15 for a ticket and extra $10 for snacks to go and see it. Maybe one for a Friday night DVD.
By Jeremy White
27 October 2011
Leave a Reply