It’s the near future and the government has put in a population control method in which people stop again at 25 years old. On your 25th birthday you get a wonderful little gift in the form of 52 more weeks to live. After the clock runs out, so do you and it’s up to you to earn, steal or inherit more time. However, that becomes harder and harder to do as time is literally the only currency in this dystopian world. A cup of coffee costs 4min. A bus across town is 2 hours and don’t even think about staying overnight in a nice hotel unless you’re prepared to shorten your life by 6 weeks. So when all is said and done most people in this world are like Will Salas (Justin Timberlake). He has managed to live 3 years after his 25th birthday. However, in those three years he hasn’t woken up to more than a day on his clock. He literally lives each day like it’s his last.
When Will meets a “young man” named Henry Hamilton at a bar (definitely a place I’d be spending time at in what could be my last day on Earth) with over 100 years on his clock, he is perplexed. In the ghetto, time gets you killed as minute-men are everywhere looking to take what they can. Henry seems to have a death wish as he doesn’t mind flaunting his wealth. When a gang gets word of a young socialite living on the edge in a ghetto bar they take heed and seek to rob the man of his time. Will intervenes and escapes with what little time he has left on his clock and this careless man. Henry is a depressed man of over a hundred years old. He has all the time in the world but nothing to do with it. He reveals to Will that people aren’t made to live forever and that is why the rich continue to raise prices on everything; so the poor die and the rich stay immortal. After a discussion with Will, Henry decides to take matters into his own hands. Unsure of how to fix the system himself, he relies on the cunning of young Will Salas to hopefully bring to light the corruption of the rich. Henry gives Will all his remaining time entrusting that he will know what to do with it.
The next day, Will, with a hundred years to share, tragically see’s his mother die in his arms after her bus fare drains the last remaining minutes from her life. This kicks Will, and the movie, into action as he sets out to utilize the time he has to take down the system.
This film had more potential than I have seen from a film in a long time. A young man takes on the system after a tragedy is not a new idea but the world it was set in surely was; it is a world where time is all that matters. Director Andrew Niccol created an incredible place where you truly believed time was money.
I really do like the dichotomy between Amanda Seyfried’s character, Sylvia West, and Will. She grew up never having to look at her watch but never truly living. So when Will comes into her life, she sees something different in him that she is not used to seeing. As he attempts to expose the system from the inside, his disguise of being rich doesn’t fool her. He does everything fast, which is something people from her world just don’t do.
The filmmaking itself seemed really well thought-out and planned. What better place to set a movie about age and perfection than right here in the heart of it, Los Angeles. The film is also being released in a truly unique time for it to make a real connection with people. In Time is set in the world where there is no middle class. The rich get richer and the poor simply die. In fact, in our roundtables with the actor’s, one of the questions that came up for each of them was the events currently happening in New York and how that plays so well into the movie.
Beyond the world itself, the film is paper thin. I think Justin Timberlake is an incredible actor but I felt the words he was given carried no weight to them. The script in general lacks a certain luster and depth we’ve come to expect from Niccols. The film is riddled with one-liners regarding time that were funny the first couple of times but eventually got tiresome. I think the filmmakers got too caught up showing us something cool that they forgot they had a brilliant idea at their disposal. The reason Will is sprung into action is lost by the end of the film. I completely forgot about his mother and why he was on this mission to begin with. It’s hard not to be swept up in the world that looks this good but you can see right through it.
For me the standout’s here are both Matt Bomer and Vincent Kartheiser, who spend way too little time onscreen. Kartheiser plays Philippe Weis, Sylvias father, one of the 1% in the film. They each play old men in a young person’s body and they do it convincingly well. You can see the age in their eyes and feel what being able to live forever, and not age, can do to a person. Henry (Bomer) and Philippe are opposites in the same way Sylvia and Will are. Henry is unable to deal with the expectations that are set out for him while Philippe is more than happy to take as much time as he can. Also, from his time on Mad Men, it’s always amazing to see the gears in Kartheiser’s, kill or be killed, mind at work.
At the end of the day I think In Time is a waste of time. It plays out more like a straight action/drama when it could have really been so much more. It strings together scenes in hopes of coherency and misses the mark. I mean really? If you had 10 seconds left to live and a block up the road is more time, kick off those heels ladies. Coming from the production team who brought us one of the best future peaks at our world in Children of Men, I expected so much more. But if you’re looking for a film where pretty people do cool things, In Time offers just that. It’s an inspired idea that offers no true inspiration.
[Rating:2.5/5]
