thoughts on In Time

So, I go for months seeing very few movies, and then I see two in two days. That's how it goes, I guess. On Saturday, the day before I left for Christmas break, I went to see In Time at the discount theater. I've had a few days to think about this, so I'm going to give you my verdict right off the bat: Interesting idea for a movie, good actors. However, I think that a better movie could have been made with a similar idea and the same actors. With that in mind, here goes:

Justin Timberlake's character, Will, tells us in voiceover as the movie begins that humans are now genetically engineered to stop aging when they turn twenty-five; at that point, they have one year to live, unless they can get more time. Time functions as currency; for example, a small purchase, like a cup of coffee, might cost four minutes, while a larger purchase, like a car, might cost something like sixty years. At your job, you get paid in time, rather than in money. I'm going to get a few of my nitpicks out of the way right off the bat:

1) I would have liked more of an explanation for the whole "we stop aging at twenty-five" thing. So...you have, like, bionic organs that never wear down? Could you still die from a disease, or have all of those been cured? One character "drinks himself to death"...doesn't this mean that you can still die if you abuse your body, and that this could theoretically also happen slowly over time? I mean, some characters are living to be well over a hundred years old...is there really any way to avoid the daily wear and tear on your body that happens through basic every day activities, let alone through eating unhealthily, not exercising, smoking, and other relatively common unhealthy behaviors? If they would have explained that people do sporadically have to go to the doctor for some sort of rejuventaing treatment, or-- okay, I'm going to stop trying to make sense of something that doesn't actually make sense. Given the lack of time devoted to the explanation in the film, I don't think we're really supposed to be asking these types of questions...but they would be interesting ones to explore, don't you think?

2) Everyone's personal clock displaying how much time they have left to live is displayed on their forearm. Further, it is very easy to transfer time from one person to another; you basically just have to take their hand and sort of twist, with the person giving their time's hand on top. This causes the following problems for the movie's characters: Having your clock displayed on your arm is basically the equivalent of not only walking around with *all of the money you have* on you at all times, but being forced to carry around a sign displaying how much money you are carrying. This, combined with the fact that time can be transferred from person to person so easily, means that everyone lives in constant fear of being robbed. For poor people living in the ghetto (like Will), this means that it is fairly useless to have more time than what you absolutely need to live from day to day; if you had more, it would just be stolen from you, anyway. If you are rich, you have to walk around with guards all the time.

This creates a great deal of the movie's drama, so from a pure storytelling standpoint, I can understand why things work this way. I can also understand why, from a practical standpoint, it would need to be fairly easy to transfer time from one person to another; with people running out of time constantly, you need to be able to give someone your time easily in order to save their life. What I don't understand is, given that this way of life has been going on for at least four or five generations, judging by the age of some of the characters, why they haven't come up with a better system for the storing and transfer of time. We have a better system for storing and transferring money right this second. However, this aspect of the plot is part of what I would identify as one of the movie's main arguments, which is:

Using actual seconds, minutes, hours, days, etc. of your life as currency is ridiculous. As the movie points out, there is more than enough time to go around; there is no reason why, for example, every single person couldn't be given seventy-five or 100 years to live at birth, have *money* be currency just like it is now, and have everyone know that when your time's up, your time's up. A significant portion of movie involves Will and Amanda Seyfried's character, Sylvia, stealing time and distributing it to whoever happens to be around, thoroughly messing up the economy. There's obviously some sort of argument about distribution of wealth going on here, too, but that's a whole other thing that I don't really care to get into.

The movie's other main argument, as I undersand it, is:

The system in place in this movie basically ruins everyone's quality of life. Poor people's days entirely consist of figuring out how to earn/steal/borrow more time. Rich people, on the other hand, never do anything risky. As we learn, though people supposedly can't die of natural causes other than their clocks simply running out (though, as mentioned before, certain plot points seem to contradict that), they can, just like we can today, die in accidents. As a result, rich people don't do anything even remotely risky; when Will acquires a great deal of time/money and goes to buy a car, the salesman tells him that he can have it delivered. "Delivered?" Will asks in confusion. "To wherever you plan to have it displayed," the salesman explains. Rich people don't drive; you could die that way. Sylvia has lived her whole life with the ocean right in her backyard but has never, until she meets Will, swam in it; it's too dangerous.

To me, this is the most interesting idea the movie brings up: in today's world, we all know that we are going to die at some point, yet we willingly engage in a number of activities that we know could potentially kill us. We might doubt the likelihood of dying while participating in these activities, and we certainly hope that we won't; however, we know it is a possibility, and we still drive cars, swim, and do other far more dangerous things. Would knowing that you could live forever *unless* something unforeseen happened make you less likely to take even the most basic of risks? Similarly, would you put off doing certain things literally forever if you knew that you would probably always have the chance, and always be physically well enough to do them? And if you, like the rich people in this movie, rarely (if ever)experienced the death of someone you knew, would you have an almost paralyzing fear of death? These are issues that I don't think about every day, and I like that the movie brought them up.

However, in the end, the movie doesn't have enough time (heh) to explore all of the legitimately interesting issues it raises, nor does it have time to fill the plot holes that are present. Add to that the issues with distribution of wealth/the differences in the ways that rich and poor spend and guard their money/the difficulty of moving between social classes/the social problems that are created by poverty that I have barely even scratched the surface on in this review, but that are very present throughout the movie, I think that I would definitely say that the movie is trying to do too much. Add to *that* the fact that the movie eventually devolves into a fairly standard chase movie and that I actually wound up getting a little bit bored watching a movie with endless possibilities, I can't say that this was an awesome movie. It was, however, interesting. Grab a friend, see it, and have a lively conversation afterwards.