There’s a certain subgenre of sci fi pictures that look more or less the same — emptiness, vast concrete landscapes, subdued characters in crisp dark suits, sunglasses, shiny anachronistic cars. (Off the top of my head, try Gattaca, Equilibrium, The Island, and The Thirteenth Floor — though countless others exist.) In Time is unquestionably among these, and is unquestionably among the worst.
Concept in brief: In the future (I think?) people have a set time to live. Once they reach 25, a green digital arm-clock comes to life and counts down to zero. Time is currency and currency is time. Miss a daily paycheck and you drop dead. The rich can live forever, the poor hover minutes from death.
Plot in brief: Justin Timberlake is a poor kid who’s accused of killing a rich dude. Actually the rich dude gifts JT with 100 years and offs himself. JT takes his ill-acquired gains and lives it up in “New Greenwich,” where he meets Amanda Seyfried. The cops (called “timekeepers”), led by a clearly unhappily slumming Cillian Murphy, pursue the pair through high society and the ghetto.
I guess this could have been an okay story if it stuck to that and if the leads were at all interesting to watch. But they’re not, and to make it worse, the film wanders off into yawnland, morphing into a part-Robin Hood, part eat-the-rich anti-capitalist musing wholly untethered to reality.
In Time has a lot more wrong with it, too. For starters, it’s trailerbait: You know, an idea that makes for a good two-minute teaser but doesn’t translate well into a full length film. (Another terrific example of this: Surrogates.) Second, it stars Justin Timberlake. (He’s not improved since our last encounter.) Third, it beats its simple premise utterly to death with a non-stop barrage of supposedly clever wordplay. “Don’t waste my time,” “time on his hands,” and so on. (One teeny tiny little Clockwork Orange makes up a bunch of future words, and now every two-bit sci-fi wants a shot at the title. To see this done right — as with most sci fi elements — watch Minority Report. And no, I won’t stop using parentheticals.) Fourth, the storyline is a largely inscrutable jumble of nonsense. (Perhaps this should be number one?)
JT and Seyfried are impossibly wooden. Think Hawke and Thurman in Gattaca, but three days deep in the quaaludes and doing a table read for Eyes Wide Shut. More chemistry happens at absolute zero.
And if you think a Hollywood picture in which every character is played by a gorgeous 25 year old is notable, think again. (Turns out this already describes pretty much every Hollywood picture.)
High points: It’s visually pretty crisp I guess, though there’s little new here. One guy has a different font on his arm-numbers, which sort of made me laugh. (Might have been a mistake?) That’s really it. Even otherwise good actors (like Murphy) are fairly unwatchable here. It also boasts one of the worst misuses of Charles Darwin in film. Time-numbers on our arms as… evolution? By natural selection? What?
Sci fi of course is commonly used to spotlight real social problems. But here, In Time simply tries too hard. Its Robin Hood twist is uninspired and unconvincing, not to mention economically ignorant. (JT tries, essentially, to give a dollar to everyone and thereby improve their lot.) Its fundamental socialist undergirding is not in itself problematic, but the implementation is. Its hamfisted attempt to drum up populist support for overthrowing the rich misfires at just about every turn — and this has not historically been a very tough case to make. Like, really. Also, JT’s main motivation for all this seems to boil down to a curious tirade against inflation and the cost of living index. (?) Yeah, don’t ask.
As an aside, I should note that for a film so steeped in a carpe diem type ethos, this movie will quite shamelessly squander your time in the theater. The result is sort of doubly offensive. It’s not enough that the bully takes your lunch money — he stands over you listing off all the other things you could have bought with it.
To be fair, I will say that if your idea of a good time is watching shiny old Lincoln Continentals cruising around Century City, you should see this film. Someone really called in the favors at the classic car motorpool. This film has a LOT of old Lincolns.
I was going to accuse the director of ripping off Gattaca pretty intensely in the set design department, until I reached the end credits and realized this was directed by Andrew Niccol (who did Gattaca as well). Gattaca was a good movie, really. He also did Lord of War, which I absolutely loved, and s1m0ne, which I (and probably anyone with jellyfish-plus neural development) thought was total and utter garbage. In short, he’s hit or miss.
In Time is occasionally fun, but unintelligent, unsurprising, and unlikely to spark much reflection. If you’ve never seen a sci fi film, I guess you might like this. Otherwise, it’s two hours better spent elsewhere.
HAUS VERDICT: Stupid. And no, I absolutely will not make a time-based pun here.