In Time (**)
Directed by: Andrew Niccol
Starring: Justin Timberlake, Amanda Seyfried, Cillian Murphy, Olivia
Wilde, Matt Bomer, Vincent Kartheiser, Johnny Galecki
Seen: October 28th 2011
** Out of ****
In Time feels like what Writer’s Block must look like. Andrew Niccol
is an accomplished director, having previously wowed audiences with Gattaca,
The Truman Show, The Terminal (story only), and Lord of War, but on In Time it seems
he’s hoping for things to work, for the elements to fall in place and gel,
wishing for a semblance of synergy among it all. In Time looks cool, the
concept is great, some points of social commentary (however unsubtle) are relevant
and interesting, some moments of humour are pretty funny and well-timed and the
actors are mostly rather good, but somehow the sum of the parts is far more
than whole.
In a future possibly 10 or a 1000 years from now, possibly in a
parallel universe, humans have found a way to stop aging past 25; where an
additional year of life kicks in, a count-down clock in green letters in your
arm, which you use as you want, time being currency, literally. 4 minutes for a
coffee, 59 years for a car, and you’re paid in minutes, hours, and days. People
can give each other time by locking arms, and other take time from whoever is
weaker by forcing them into an arm-wrestling match of sorts. There are definite
class barriers with the poor, who rarely wake up with enough time to make it to
the end of the day, living far away from the rich, separated by concrete
barriers and ridiculous time-payments to move across the boundaries into
progressively richer neighbourhoods.
Will Salas (Timberlake) is 28 and lives with his 50 year old mother
Rachel (Wilde). Will works in a plant that manufactures the small containers
time is kept in, something akin to wallets in our minds. When he goes to a bar
with his best friend Borel (Galecki) one evening, they run into Henry Hamilton
(Bomer), who simply has no will to live anymore, having had enough of the
boring life of immortality where no-one takes risks because that’s the only way
to die. Hamilton tells Will of how the rich keep the poor as poor as they are
to contain population growth before giving Will all his time, committing
suicide. The police, or Timekeepers, find no evidence of suicide and go after
Will, just after he loses his mother when her time runs out as a result of a
price increase for something as simple as a municipal bus trip. Will takes the
opportunity, and the 116 years he now has at his disposal, to get to the rich
neighbourhoods, where he quickly amasses over a 1000 years, but is captured by
the famous Timekeeper Raymond León (Murphy), who takes all his time.
Will escapes, taking a hostage in Sylvia Weis (Seyfreid), daughter of the
super-rich time magnate Phillipe Weis (Kartheiser). They run, with Sylvia
quickly joining Will’s side after she herself gets close to timing out a few
times. In Time then turns into a Robin Hood/Bonnie & Clyde reference while
Will and Sylvia run from León right up to the nihilistic ending,
hoping for something better to rise from the ashes.
After a few days of thinking about In Time it became more apparent with
every hour that it was bad, and like I surmised in the first paragraph,
suffering from serious writer’s block. I have to mention too, that there are moments
so jarringly bad or in line with the movie’s own rules so mathematically
inaccurate that the viewer is taken completely out of the story; a bumpy car
chase does ridiculously little damage to cars while a crash beggars belief; time
doesn’t seem to add up, or feels longer than it should; while the worst is a
heroic panning shot of two bit-part sideline characters at the apex of the film:
it broke me, knocking the wind from my sails as to why on earth this would be
used. In Time is a pale imitating shadow of what Niccol is capable of, and I hope
he finds his stride again soon.
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