Don’t ask any questions of In Time, and it will neither tell you any lies, nor will it reveal that maybe it just doesn’t know the answers at all. There are a lot of crimes on display within Andrew Niccol’s dystopian actioner, but its biggest offence may be the fact that for a movie that aspires to be thought-provoking science fiction, it doesn’t really want you to think much beyond what it shows you onscreen.
Niccol’s film doesn’t waste any time trying to show what it’s about, and simply outlines the background in a succint voiceover. It’s the future, and humans have managed to alter the genetic code to stop aging at 25, after which they have one year to live. A glowing green countdown clock on each person’s arm displays how much time they have left in seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, and years. When the clock hits zero, you drop dead, your life switched off like a light. The time on the clock can can be added to or subtracted from: time can be earned by working, used to trade for goods or services, and given to (or stolen from) others. “Time is money” isn’t a proverb: it’s literally true.
It’s a potentially fascinating premise, and Niccol expands on it as he reveals more about what the world has become. People are divided geographically according to wealth, with the richest of the rich, people with thousands of years accumulated, living in the city of New Greenwich. The poor live in a dingy ghetto where they work just to barely prolong their lives. They usually have only a day or two, or even just a few hours, on their clock. They earn or hustle enough time at work or on the streets each day to get them through to the next, in a diabolical life-and-death twist on wage slavery. It costs increasing amounts of time to travel from one zone to another, making upward mobility nearly impossible.
By now, Niccol’s allegory has become plainly obvious. In that sense, In Time is a movie perfectly tailored to the moment, a fairy tale about the growing division between rich and poor, and the morality of stealing from the rich in a system that is unfairly rigged to favor them anyway. The deep dark secret used by the powerful to justify the way this society works is, “For a few to be immortal, many must die.” What Niccol means is that “For a few to be rich, many must be poor,” and whatever your feelings about that particular criticism, the biggest problem with In Time is how unsubtly Niccol hammers that point throughout the movie.
His vessels for examining those inequities are Will Salas (Justin Timberlake) — a poor ghetto resident who is gifted with over 100 years by a wealthy man who wants to die — and Sylvia (Amanda Seyfried), an heiress whose father is one of the richest bankers in the world. Salas, who retains his nothing-to-lose ghetto attitude even after his gift, gambles his 100 years into over 1,000 before a police force known as timekeepers catch up with him, suspecting he must have murdered his benefactor. (The lead timekeeper is played by miscast Cillian Murphy, who, at 35, calls too much distracting attention to the fact that much of the cast is, and looks, much older than 25.) Will kidnaps Sylvia to get away, and once she’s come around to his way of thinking, they become temporal Robin Hoods, stealing time from her father’s banks to distribute to the poor.
Once they’re on the run, they never quit running; one of the movie’s recurring notions is that people in the ghetto are always good runners, because they never have time to waste. But the constant motion robs the film of any opportunity to explore the issues that it raises thoughtfully or flesh out the finer points of the rules of its universe. There’s enough story here to barely fill out an episode of The Twilight Zone — and it feels cut from similar cloth, though without much of a twist — but to flesh things out to feature-length, Niccol just throws in a whole lot of chasing.
That non-stop activity is fine in and of itself; the film is perfectly acceptible as popcorn entertainment. Timberlake is an instantly likable presence onscreen (even if he and Seyfried don’t have quite as much chemistry as they really need), and Niccol keeps things moving relentlessly forward without any dull moments. But he also sets a higher bar than just that for himself that he’s never able to clear. The depth of the world he has created is insufficient, while the metaphors he’s employing are far more on the nose than they need to be. The end result doesn’t necessarily feel like wasted time, but I doubt Will Salas would consider it time well spent, either.
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In Time
Written and directed by Andrew Niccol
Starring Justin Timberlake, Amanda Seyfried, Cillian Murphy, Vincent Kartheiser
Running time: 109 minutes
Rated PG-13 for violence, some sexualty and partial nudity, and strong language.
Opens today at theaters across the area.
