I had the pleasure of seeing In Time with these two fellows pictured above last night.
In painting the dystopic future, the movie successfully uses many of the same clever tricks as Gattaca. There are sleek, 1960’s cars made futuristic with flourishes of sound design. Habitants of this world don’t even have the benefit of cell phones, leading to dramatic payphone usage at key plot points. Guns are the only weapon at anyone’s disposal, and the main city just appears to be a version of Sao Paolo with a stronger affinity for frosted glass. This technique of paring down overt displays of technology to let the central allegory play out is what I enjoyed most, and is so welcome against the prevailing ethos of flashy but banal sci-fi.
The movie was also extraordinarily successful as a stark anti-capitalist propaganda piece — not something I would have thought very likely from a mainstream film until a few months ago (a complete accident of timing). The writing, though, is so tempered with time-related puns that by fifteen minutes in, the three of us were laughing uncontrollably through most extended dialogues. The allegory is also so lacking in subtlety (TIME IS MONEY, ltierally, NO, LITERALLY. AND THE RICH MANIPULATE THE POOR TO KEEP IT) that, in combination with all the time chatter and no small number of high-speed chases, it was hard to take much too seriously.
As a low-tech, high-polish dystopic future Marxist allegory with Justin Timberlake in a breakout action role? Best I’ve ever seen.
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