In Time (2011) is a hilarious waste of great sci fi ideas.

This movie is an example of a compelling science fiction setting being wasted and/or botched. The plot is essentially that people have digital clocks on their forearms that count down to their death. Life is free until age 25 then you get one year. After that you need to earn, steal, recharge it however you can. Will (Justin Timberlake) gets a huge time donation from a random rich guy and a movie ensues.

I loved the idea of time being a currency, and the idea that people don't age past 25 so you can't tell who in a family is daughter, mom or grandma. But after about the first twenty minutes it falls into recycling tried and worn movie cliches. A high stakes poker game, bad guys dressed in black leather, protagonist's father being some sort of folklore hero. etc

If you stick it out for a while, things start to get pretty funny. The plotholes and conveniences just compound on each other until nothing makes sense. Here's some examples.

• Cillian Murphy is a Timekeeper, a type of police who's job and reason for targeting Will are both unclear. Essentially, Will has time, but is not rich and therefore must be guilty of something. But later on, the gangster character explains that the Timekeepers let him kill and steal as much as he wants, provided that it's done in the ghetto neighborhood. Even though that's where Will met the rich guy who gifted him a hundred years. In fact, the move only happens because Will interrupts the gangster from stealing it for himself.

• There's talk about how distributing time will make the system unstable. But after Will robs a time bank and lets the whole neighborhood steal as much as they want, the timekeepers don't care about collecting any of it. They just let everyone walk free. Also it's convenient that all this bank robbing does not encounter a single armed guard or locked bank vault.

• They hint that Will's dad was some sort of robin hood character, though it is never fully explained and has no impact on the story whatsoever. There's dialogue from evil rich people about how giving away time is intolerable, but no one seems to care that there's a mission across the street giving it away for free.

• Throughout the movie Will is running away from Timekeepers, but they seem to have a method of tracking any and all time transactions going on, displayed on a big switchboard on the wall. Yet they didn't know how Will got his extra time in the first place. Or that he won more at a casino. He sits there and explains through exposition what the audience and characters should already know.

• It is absurdly easy to steal each others time. We see it taken by force or from sleeping people a few times, and seemingly no one can stop it. However, they establish 'fighting' as a common thing. Wherein two people hold hands and use willpower to determine who wins and collects the other person's time. Like a mental arm wrestle. That means that people can stop a time transfer, but don't? And can't put on a password or a secure gauntlet/wallet?

• The timekeeper antagonist (Murphy) repeats over and over that he has been doing this job for fifty years. And there's hints of him having a change of heart, or some sort of character arc. But then he drops dead during the final confrontation because he FORGOT to refill his own time. Rather than just arrest our main characters, he does the talking villain thing and it literally kills him. Oh, and Will is then able to recharge himself from the police car. They just wire him another man's paycheque and no one's the wiser.

• Amanda Seyfried is in the film too, but she doesn't have any character traits aside from wearing skimpy clothing and giant anime-worthy eyes that take up most of her head. She's a rich girl who becomes a criminal to to get back at daddy. Though she does shoot the timekeeper, who seemed to be trying to take them in alive and unharmed, and was basically just doing his job. Luckily bullets don't really hurt in this universe so he's okay.

Submitted February 27, 2020 at 11:40AM by This_neverworks https://ift.tt/2Tkq22M