In Time
Bonnie and Clyde meets Logan’s Run channelling Fight Club. It’s as derivative as this sentence implies.
In a future where car companies only sell concept cars, people stop ageing at 25 and get a single year of life until their literal biological clock runs out. They can beg, borrow or steal time amongst each other, if they don’t want to work menial jobs. Life in the ghetto is hard, with people living hand-to-mouth, but the elite lives virtually forever in their ivory towers.
The time concept is a thinly veiled allegory for money, with the 25 years rule added to avoid being too realistic regarding children.
Most of the characters are stereotypes that turn gunslingers at a drop of a hat.
Timberlake and Amanda Seyfried don’t have a chance to show off their acting chops. Matt Bomer appears (clothed) as the instigator of the plot. Playing Agent Smith there’s Cillian Murphy. A bunch of other familiar faces appear in diverse roles, but since everyone must look 25 that restricts the choice greatly.
Even though Roger Deakins was involved in this, when most of the scenes take place in LA landmarks, there’s not much he can do to make it visually diverse and interesting.
While I liked this and it makes for a good conversation-starter on the concepts of money, capitalism and society organisation, I expected more from this director. There’s too many shoot-outs and car chases that obscure the point of the script and glorify wrong behaviours that only serve to stereotype people by their social status.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.