In Time

This week's film was In Time starring Justin Timberlake, a suspensful scifi flick where every person has to earn the right to live another day.  In this future, every person stops aging at 25, but they only have one year to live.  People can earn more time, but as soon as the clock reaches zero, they die.  Jobs pay in time: minutes, hours, months to live.  The rich live for millenia while the poor struggle to scrape up enough seconds to survive another day.

Concept alone makes this film worth seeing.  The acting, dialogue, and scripting, while not wonderful, gives the film a plausibility that most sci-fi films lack. While I didn't love this film, it was definitely worth seeing.  Overall, I'll give this a 3.5/5.  While a novel idea, the material started to drag towards the middle of the film, after all, there are only so many different ways you can refer to time.

The plot is loosely based on Robin Hood, minus all the characters but Robin, Maid Marian, King John, and the Sheriff of Nottingham.  The story follows a young man from the slums Will Salas (Timberlake) who receives a gift of a century from a wealthy man who wants to die.  After Will's mother dies in his arms, he vows to bring down the system that is causing millions of people to die every day so that the richest people can be immortal.  Will travels with his new found Time into the wealthiest area of the futuristic America.  There he meets the daughter of the richest man in America, gets arrested for stealing time, kidnaps the daughter, and starts to rob time banks to help the poor.

As I said above, the concept is wonderful.  That humanity has reached a point where we can stop aging and literally trade our lives away...wow.  That all currency is based off how much time left on the clock gives the cost of living a new meaning, which the director employs continuously.

Despite the brilliance of the concept, the dialogue was shoddy.  There are only so many different references that can be implemented to time.  The gang bangers are called minutemen,  mugging someone is called cleaning the clock, the cost of living literally refers to the minutes required to buy items, the police are called timekeepers, and there are a host of other ill conceived, overused references to time.  It fits with the plot of the film sure, but come on there are only so many times the references can be used and still be a novelty.

I can't say much for or against the cast of the film.  The cast only has two really recognizable names: Justin Timberlake and Olivia Wilde.  The other main characters are supporting characters in other movies, or main characters in little known movies.  Overall, they did a decent job with the scripting they had, but the performance left me wanting to see a few more main stream actors than the younger generation.  My biggest complaint about the cast, though, was that  Olivia Wilde and Maid Marian (Amanda Seyfried) should have switched roles, considering Olivia Wilde is much more...appealing.

As always, here's the link to the reviews on Rotten Tomatoes.  Being a fence rider on this film, I can't really say definitively who's correct.  Like Peter Rainer I thought the movie went on for a little too long, and like Christian Toto I feel that the movie, while an interesting concept, could have used more polished dialogue.  However I do not agree at all with Dana Steven's idea that the pauses in dialogue were too long.  To me, they didn't feel any longer than normal, in fact I found it rather nice to see two characters have a decent conversation without trying to interrupt each other, or have to wait for cue cards to speak their lines (like in the critic's favorite film of the year Drive).  My favorite review of the week: Laramy Legel's idea that In Time was a "clumsy preach-a-thon."  Preachy about what exactly?  How is it any different from any other sci-fi film having anything to do with human evolution or with some major corporation that runs the planet?  Sorry but I don't see where he's coming from exactly.

Overall this was a good film to see and a better one to buy at bargain price.  the interesting concept doesn't make up for a script that felt like a second draft.