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In Time: Fun, Despite It’s Failings

By Tiffiny Whitney · October 31, 2011

In Hollywood’s quest to take every classic movie ever made and put a modern twist on it (as opposed to experimenting with a concept called “originality”), the latest casualty is the story of Robin Hood in Andrew Niccol’s newest film In Time.  Starring superstar commodity Justin Timberlake, sci-fi darling Olivia Wilde, and the exotic Amanda Seyfried, In Time suffers from structural problems, but ultimately succeeds in its aim to entertain audiences, despite its unbelievable concept and lack of full plot development.

Will Salas (Timberlake) is a good guy from the ghetto just looking to make it one more day—literally.  In Will Salas’s world, the aging gene has been turned off via genetic manipulation, and everyone physically stops aging at 25.  While this sounds great in theory, the world realized somewhere along the line that when you give immortality to everyone, overpopulation becomes a real concern.  To combat the problem, fiat currency is apparently done away with and “time” becomes a tradable commodity in which a person can buy everything from a cup of coffee to infinite survival potential.  Tracked by a neon green stop watch that is somehow tattooed to everyone’s arm (from birth, even!), your “clock” starts at 25 and you get one year to either earn more time…or you collapse into a heap once the death clock hits zero.

Will, normally living on a meager minimum wage, is given the opportunity of a lifetime when a mysterious and “wealthy” man with over a hundred years on him decides to will away his time to Will, under the condition that Will spend the time “wisely.”  Hell-bent on avenging the death of his mother (played by Olivia Wilde), whom Will believes died unfairly at the hands of the inequitable time currency system, Will decides to use his newly acquired time by exacting his revenge on the rich by stealing massive amounts of time and redistributing it to the poor in hopes of disrupting the system to the point of collapse.  Enlisting the help of an evil time banker’s rebellious daughter, Slyvia Weis (Amanda Seyfried), Will and his partner in crime embark on a crime spree to equalize the great divide between the rich and the poor and, thus, eliminate the potential for immortality of any one person.  

I’ll be honest—In Time is a fun ride, but it ultimately suffers from numerous inconsistencies, leaps in logic, and plot holes.  Pretending for a moment that its high-concept idea of using “time” as a as a programmable currency is plausible, the biggest problem for In Time is that it fails to clearly lay out ground rules for its own universe.  For example—sure, I’ll buy that time is the currency for this futuristic world without needing to know how it’s even scientifically possible to achieve genetic manipulation that ‘counts down’ at 25…but to not explain how a nebulous and intangible concept such as time can somehow be harnessed is a pretty gaping hole that I’m not quite willing to suspend my disbelief on.  That, and the fact that Amanda Seyfried is running around the whole time in 6-inch stilettoes. 

Additionally, though it plays pretty well to the whole “steal from the rich, give to the poor” concept in an inequitable world (which is pretty relevant nowadays), screenwriter and director Andrew Niccol also fails to fully develop his characters into anything more than passion-driven action stars by completely neglecting to give them clear motivations or plans for achieving their goals.  For example, though it’s pretty clear that Will’s revenge quest is spurred by his desire to punish those at the “top” of society’s chain, whom he believes perpetuate a system that caused the untimely death of his mother, but his motivations and plans for achieving those ends are much more muddy.  He wants to punish the wealthy with no one really in mind, or even a clue as to how to do so.  Even more puzzling are the motivations of Seyfried’s poor-little-rich-girl character, Sylvia, who seems to be motivated purely by the idea of rebellion alone, and a desire to get into bad-boy-with-a-good-heart Justin Timberlake’s pants.  Finally, the horrendous long-term implications of their actions appear to never even be considered, despite the fact that it can be inferred pretty easily that a world collapse of a “time currency,” upon which society exists, would probably be a pretty bad thing…  Like…everyone dying.

From a screenwriting standpoint, In Time could have been bettered simply by more clearly laying out ground rules, more clearly developing its characters, and more clearly explaining character motivations.  That being said, the desire for logic and explanation should not overshadow the fact that In Time, despite its failings, is actually pretty fun in its actions and visually stimulating.  If you’re the type who is willing to overlook “simple” things like that in exchange for escapist entertainment…then it’s actually a pretty fun film.  And in today’s world, where the “concept” gets an audience’s money more than a well-laid plot—it’s at least semi-comforting that a writer can make pretty decent money so long as the concept is “novel” in some way.