In Time (2011)
Directed by Andrew Niccol
Starring: Cillian Murphy, Justin Timberlake and Amanda Seyfried
In Tme is a Sci-Fi with a social conscience or perhaps it’s a cynical attempt to exploit the growing discontent between the ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’ either way it’s entertaining. The premise takes the mantra “time is money” literally, on an unspecified date in the future a person’s time on earth became their currency in the market. A person once they reach 25 years of age, stops aging and a digital clock appears on their arm counting down from a year, unless they work or trade and earn more “time”, they will die when this clock reaches zero. How this new system of economics came into being is never fully explained but its outcome serves as a social commentary to our present situation.
You see our protagonist Will (Timberlake) is a working class factory worker, living literally day by day on a salary of hours and minutes, essentially a slave. Every day in the ghetto, he passes by a body of someone who simply just ran out of time, the people in the ghetto are desperate for work and will accept any wage reduction, any price rise on goods because their lives depend on it.
One day Will meets a suicidal middle classer who gives him his remaining years as a parting gift (how nice) prompting Will to venture into the middle class world (which was impossible before due to the heavy tolls for crossing the bridges). Upon reaching there, he sees a world where time means nothing, the pace of life is slow and relaxed as everyone has 100s of years to live and have been living luxuries lives on the blood of the working man. He meets up with Sylvia (Seyfried), who’s bored of her up tight father who fears everything in case it harms him (the irony of course being he has all the time in the world to live yet has not lived a day). Will and Sylvia move to address the inequity of the situation and redistribute time freeing the working class all the while being pursued by Raymond (Murphy), a cog in the system.
The film is hardly revolutionary but it is entertaining and while no particular actor stands out, the story is solid and the concept intriguing. An interesting question to be raised from this surely must be is Hollywood going Marxist?
This article was originally published in:
Fountain News Digital – December 2011 (Issue 7)
We are re-publishing all articles from our past newsletter, Fountain News Digital, and you can view all completed newsletters here. There were nine issues published in total between 2010 and 2012.
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