IN TIME

Imagine a world where you stop aging at 25.  That sounds great, but you also get a big green countdown clock in your arm and you have to use time as money; Poor people live day to day, and a single mistake could cost them their lives, whilst rich people luxuriate in gated communities and lavish casinos.  That sounds less great.  But alas, an evocative metaphor does not an entertaining feature make.

Justin Timberlake plays our protagonist Will Salas.  We know he's a nice guy because when a little girl on the street asks him 'Got a minute?' he offers her five; remember that's money.  We also know he's nice because he's good to his mother played by Olivia Wilde who would be his girlfriend in any other movie; he's specifically good to her because he buys her a bottle of champagne for her 50th birthday.  Alright, mild spoiler warning, but in her 2nd or 3rd scene in the movie, Wilde misses the bus because it costs two hours and she only has 90 minutes so she runs for 90 minutes trying to find her son so he can transfer her some more time but she dies.  So I guess instead of liquor, he probably should have just passed her some minutes.  Or bought her a bike.  Maybe some roller blades.  To keep with the film's retro-futuristic production design how about some roller skates instead?

Also, later we see the same bus driver get bribed with a bunch of hours; so since Olivia Wilde still looks like Olivia Wilde, couldn't she have tried to convince the driver to let her on by... you know...  Look at her!  She's fucking gorgeous!  She's wearing a short flimsy red dress and high heels.  I would think in this film's world, black market dealings and shady favors, especially sexual ones, would be commonplace; in fact, later on in the film, a Timekeeper policeman seems to be on a first name and true-age basis with a prostitute he encounters at a crime scene.  So why would a bus driver turn away a gorgeous desperate dying woman?  Why would anyone not help her?  If a beautiful woman ran up to you on the street and had only 7 minutes to live, can you think of something you would ask her to do for 6 minutes that you would pay her for?  Thanks a lot PG-13 rating!

Timberlake wanders from his low-time ghetto into a rich gated community of people with plenty of time to spare and nothing to do with it, including Vincent Kartheiser, best known as Pete Campbell on Mad Men and phoning in a watered down sniveling snarker performance here, as millionaire time-lending financier Phillipe Weiss and Amanda Seyfried, best known for being fucking gorgeous, as his sheltered, bored daughter whose name I forgot.  Timberlake must also contend with a band of sharply dressed thugs who steal time from people through arm wrestling (don't ask) lead by Alex Pettyfer, and must evade the Timekeepers lead by Cillian Murphy who phones in some quiet menace and Javert-esque dedication.

If I had to name the biggest problem with this movie, it would probably be that the characters agree on everything.  All the poor characters reliably parrot pseudo-revolutionary lines about how the rich keep them oppressed so they can live forever and the rich characters all say 'yeah isn't it great?'  This system doesn't really have any nuance; I would be fascinated by all the different perspectives of people who had lived decades youthfully and healthfully, but after one guy pronounces the experience to be kind of a drag, everybody else seems to agree and the subject isn't really broached again. Think of all the influential billionaires or third world dictators that would become even more interesting if they never had to die.  Everybody likes to joke (while they still can) that Fidel Castro is immortal, but what if he really was?  A movie about the 1000 year reign of Fidel Castro, played by Justin Timberlake, would have been a much better use of everyone's, wait for it wait for it, time.  

I would help this woman.

~  JT is a good actor, but I'm not convinced he's a movie star; his ample charisma can only carry the tortuously convoluted plot so far.

~ Where does the time come from?  Every baby is born with one year on their clock that doesn't start counting down until they turn 25.  Does that mean Pete Campbell gobbled up a million babies?  How could they make a movie where Pete Campbell eats millions of babies and have it turn out boring?  Not enough scenes of him eating babies, for one thing.  Thanks a lot PG-13 rating!

~ Andrew Niccol has a checkered film history.  He wrote and directed Gattaca, which I liked, he wrote The Truman Show, which I liked, he wrote and directed S1m0ne, which I never saw because it looked terrible, he has a story credit on The Terminal, which I hated, and he wrote and directed Lord of War, which I did not like.

~ "Save your time/money; get it?"  Damn that was too easy.

~ Time puns you can look forward to: Timekeepers, clean your clock, all the time in the world, Dayton, New Greenwich, minutemen, living day to day, and countless others I forgot or didn't notice.  Credit to my friend Harrison for pointing out the Greenwich connection which slipped past me.

~ If it's five minutes for a cup of coffee and one minute for a phone call, why does the bus cost two hours?  Get a bike.

~ Justin Timberlake outsmarts Vincent Kartheiser's two dozen bodyguards by putting on sunglasses and walking up behind them and pretending that he's one of them.  These guards offer a textbook example of diffusion of responsibility.

~ This plot feels like it could have been a mid-quality Twilight Zone episode way back when.  Somebody get Harlan Ellison and his time machine on that.

~ Some character deaths are predictable.
    "Hey are you gonna refill your time?
    "I'll just do it later."
    DEAD

~ "Time is money."  Proverb, high concept movie pitch.

~ This film's retro-futurism ultimately boils down to black cars, black clothes and no cell phones.

~ There is a black woman named Greta in this movie.

~ Harlan Ellison, acclaimed science fiction author and avid moviegoer, frequently exits theaters thinking not "Why did I pay for that garbage?" but instead "I'll sue the bastards!"  Ellison sued 20th Century Fox and James Cameron for the film The Terminator, claiming it plagiarized elements of two of his Outer Limits teleplays, 'Demon With A Glass Hand' and 'Soldier'.  People sue over (financially lucrative) stories all the time, but when you're one (cranky old) man up against a behemoth corporation with a cash cow film (series) to protect, the odds are definitely not in your favor.  Ellison managed to win, got his name added to the credits, had Cameron call him a 'parasite', and has been happily suing film studios ever since, usually receiving undisclosed settlements and sometimes story credits.  This film was apparently too similar (at least for Harlan's taste) to Ellison's 1965 short story 'Repent Harlequin! Said The Ticktockman', so he sued, the studio settled and life moved on.

~ The ending is also stupid.