Imagine the degree of power you’d possess if you could control how long everyone lived. In the new science fiction thriller, “In Time,” someone has that kind of a grip on the world. “In Time” takes place at an unspecified point in the future. However, the world still looks like the one in which you and I live.
The only visible difference is the digital clock on each person’s skin that ticks down the years, months, weeks, days, hours, minutes and seconds until he or she dies. How is this possible? Scientists have determined a way to stop the aging process. There’s just one problem: if no one dies, where would you put everyone? So someone – viewers never learn who – established a system whereby each person stops growing old at 25, and is then given one year to live.
Picture yourself in this world. The time you have on your arm is your currency. You can work to earn more time, buy groceries, take out a loan and pay it back with interest, and even spend an hour of your life on ten minutes of “love.” In this future, time literally is money, the wealthy can live forever, and the poor actually do live paycheck to paycheck.
Will Salas would like to wake up with more time on his hands than hours in the day. Between working at a factory and taking care of his 50-year-old mother (a ludicrously sexy Olivia Wilde), his life is complicated. In an early scene, he arranges to meet his mom at a bus stop to give her some of his time, but when her fare turns out to be more time than she has remaining, she’s forced to run across town to reach him. There’s an emotionally effective scene in which she runs toward him as her seconds tick down and dies just before she reaches him.
That night, Will meets a man with more than a century on his arm, and saves him from thugs out to steal his time. The man is ungrateful, however, because he’s had enough and wants to die. While Will is asleep, the man gives him most of his remaining time. His anger stoked by his mother’s death, Will sets out to bring down the system. Will is played by Justin Timberlake, which means he has the muscle for the job but not necessarily the brains, as evidenced by his lack of a plan. Through contrived circumstances, Will meets the world’s wealthiest man, wins a chunk of his time in a high stakes poker game, steals his daughter away, and gets caught between corrupt lawmen and pesky gangsters.
The plot doesn’t exactly lumber, but with the exception of a few well-executed moments, it doesn’t generate much excitement, either. Not only that, but too many things don’t make sense. Why does the daughter keep running around with Will when doing so puts her life in danger? And why does a bank with hundreds of thousands of years in its vault not have better security? The ending, in which Will and the girl must figure out a way to survive in the middle of nowhere with less than two minutes of time remaining, is tense, but it’s too little, too late.
A lot of interesting ideas percolate beneath the surface of “In Time.” I believe the people who made it wanted viewers to think about the implications of the money system under which we live. A small but powerful elite controls most of the wealth in the world, while the poor must scrape a living from the crumbs that fall from their tables. Ideas about class hierarchy, population control, wasting time, cruelty and compassion, how we ascribe value to things and more are all there, but never given room to breathe.
“In Time” would make a great television series, but as a movie, it falls short of compelling. However, I do recommend seeing it once it’s available for rental, as it offers enough entertainment value to make it worth one dollar at a Red Box. Whether or not it’s worth two hours of your time is something you’ll have to decide.
Rated PG-13 for violence, sexuality, nudity and language. Two-and-a-half stars out of four. Email David Laprad at dlaprad@hamiltoncountyherald.com.