I just saw the movie In Time starring Justin Timberlake and Amanda Seyfried. While I can’t promise you that you’ll love the movie, I do feel pretty confident in promising that you’ll like the movie.
Before I get into my thoughts, I should probably explain the movie a little bit (without giving too much away). In Time takes place in this alternate world where people have been genetically modified to stop aging at age 25, but once they reach 25 their clock starts counting down from one year (meaning they only have one year left to live). Time becomes money—people pay and are paid with time. Justin Timberlake’s character Will Salas lives in the ghetto, where nobody has over a day on their clock at any given time (literally living day-to-day). One day he is given 116 years by 105-year-old Henry Hamilton (Matt Bomer) who is ready to die. Henry tells Will that many must die for a few to be immortal, an idea that Will had never thought of, and an idea that is important throughout the rest of the film. After Henry dies (from giving Will the rest of his time), Will goes to the rich “time zone” New Greenwich where he meets Sylvia Weis (Amanda Seyfried), the dissatisfied-with-her-life-of-avoiding-risks heiress of a millionaire (a man who has over a million years). Eventually, Will and Sylvia go on the run, rob Sylvia’s father’s banks, and give the time away to anyone and everyone in the ghetto.
The acting was excellent from the entire cast, but I especially liked Cillian Murphy in this movie. You may remember Cillian Murphy as the sucker who gets an idea planted in his brain in Inception,
or the creepy guy from Batman Begins.
In this movie he plays the timekeeper Raymond Leon. A timekeeper is essentially a cop whose only job is to protect the rich people’s time. It seems to me that the character of a cop working for a corrupt system tends to fall into certain categories. There’s the cop who believes whole-heartedly in said corrupt system. There’s the cop who has no idea that a system can even be corrupt. And there’s the cop who has traditionally done what he (or she) is told, but throughout the story has a gradual awakening to the reality of the corrupt system and then tries to change it. At first it seemed as though Leon was the first type, and then as though he may be the third type, but as it turns out, he was neither! That was what made the character so brilliant to me. I was really expecting him to be a cliché character, but he wasn’t.
Instead, at the beginning Leon seems to believe that the system is right (the first type), but as the movie goes on, he seems to become more and more disillusioned (sounding more like the third type, right? Wrong!). As it turns out, he has been disillusioned all along. He is from the same ghetto as Will Salas (Timberlake), but he was able to get out and has spent 50 years protecting the time of the rich, so Leon has known his entire life how wrong it is for many to die so that a few may be immortal. He just doesn’t believe it can change. He believes that the current way is the only way it can be. He relentlessly pursues Will because he believes that Will’s method of suddenly and randomly redistributing the wealth will hurt the very people he is trying to save (a view with which I am inclined to agree). Cillian Murphy plays this complex character just right. I know my love for Cillian Murphy and his character in this movie is probably really random and that I didn’t do a very good job of explaining it, but I guess that means you’ll just have to see the movie and judge for yourself.
If you’ve lived on Earth for the last couple months, you’ve probably heard of the Occupy Wall Street protests and made the connection between the Occupy movement and this movie. I haven’t been following the Occupy movement too closely, but from what I understand, their main point is this, that top 1% (in terms of wealth) are cold, greedy buttheads who only care about becoming richer when instead they could be helping the other 99%. If the Occupy movement moved to the world of In Time, it would be called Occupy New Greenwich. A few people have thousands upon thousands of years while the masses have only hours.
As I said earlier, even though Will’s and Silvia’s hearts are in the right place, their way of redistributing the wealth will end up hurting the people they’re trying to save. It’s not that these people don’t deserve the time, but randomly giving out time to a bunch of people at once will incite mass chaos. We’ve all seen the chaos that Black Friday deals produce. What if instead of selling a 40” TV for $250, Wal-Mart was giving away a month of life to the first 100 customers? And not just any customers, customers who will die without it. And, in the movie, once the people get their time, they stop working and migrate en masse to New Greenwich. Pretty soon, because no one is working, no one will have anything (which I think was Leon’s point when he said Will and Silvia would hurt the people they were trying to help). What happens after a revolution? The biggest disappointment that I have about this movie is that it does not propose any kind of solution for how to redistribute the wealth without inciting mass chaos. Of course, I guess whoever figures that out will probably win a Nobel Peace Prize or something. I just would have liked a suggestion or two.
Anyway, if you can’t already tell from the length of this post, In Time was a thought-provoking movie. I didn’t even get into the implications that using time instead of money would have on society. Suffice it to say, this movie made me want to never waste time again, so obviously that’s why I spent over an hour writing this post instead of working on my paper for school.
On this day in 1492: Native Americans in Cuba taught Christopher Columbus about maize. Thank you, Native Americans, for enabling me to have corn chips in my taco soup today!
