Monday, October 31, 2011

In Time






Release Date: Oct 28, 2011 
Runtime: 1 hr. 55 min. 
Director: Andrew Niccol 
Cast: Justin Timberlake, Amanda Seyfried, Cillian Murphy, Vincent Kartheiser, Olivia Wilde.

If you had a chance at immortality, would you steal it? That's the quandary posed in Andrew Niccol's dystopian thriller, where the rich can live forever and the poor die young. In a Marxist future, 'time' has become the standard currency, with life hanging in the balance a year after the age of 25. When factory worker, Will Salas, is wrongly accused of murder, it's up to him to clear his name and fight the system that controls existence, before his clock inevitably runs out. In his first action role, Justin Timberlake is mediocre at best, attempting to make the most out of a flawed character and script. While the concept is fascinating on an intuitive level, various plot holes make the world in which Niccol envisions to be haphazard, resulting in an half-baked idea that never really coalesces. How did some people gain all that time? And why does it transfer so easily? Additionally, the reality of having everyone age the same way causes the roles to become oddly skewed. For instance, Olivia Wilde as Timberlake's mother is much harder to believe than Kartheiser's portrayal as Seyfried's father. This leads to the interesting notion of how difficult it is to judge a person's age mainly by appearance alone. Though "In Time" seems underdeveloped for an impending future, the moral is clear from the get-go, and ever relevant to our ongoing situation. Greed remains the same, no matter the form.

Rating: 2½ stars

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