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When science fiction thrives, when it transports you into a brave new world of intriguing, complicated ideas, it's terrific. It's the rare cinematic genre that can be both illuminating and uplifting. Drama can pull at your heartstrings and comedy can tickle your funny bone, but nothing caters to the brain better than future shock speculation. Perhaps this is why the latest from Gattaca god Andrew Niccol, In Time, fails. It doesn't do anything for mind, body, or spirit. Instead, it offers Justin Timberlake as a brooding semi-action hero, Amanda Seyfried in a horrible pageboy haircut, and Cillian Murphy as the Agent Smith substitute. Along the way, some interesting concepts are carted out, only to be undermined by limp direction and sparse storytelling.
In the not too distant future, scientists have figured out a way to make people live forever. They are genetically engineered to live to 25, and then after that, they have one year left, the minutes ticking down on a digital readout located on their arm. People can earn more time through work or investment, and as a result, it has become the main currency and trade. In this situation sits Will Salas (Timberlake). He lives in a time ghetto, far away from the rich and influential, he and his mother (Olivia Wilde) barely scraping by. When he helps a misguided man with over a century available, he ends up with his years.
This takes him to New Greenwich, and into the life of spoiled heiress Sylvia Weis (Seyfried). Her father (Vincent Kartheiser) is heavily involved in controlling the time markets. When a veteran Minuteman named Leon (Murphy) comes to collect Will's unauthorized decades, he kidnaps Sylvia and goes on the lam. He soon discovers the way in which this new society works -- in essence, allowing a few achieve a kind of immortality while killing as many of his type in the process. With Sylvia by his side, he decides to right all the wrongs, both becoming time bandits, if you will.In Time is soulless and pointless. It's an interesting idea poorly executed, a standard sci-fi trope taken to dragged out, dull extremes. What it lacks in scope and mind-bending creativity it makes up for in colorless cinematography and equally monochrome performances. Timberlake looks fine as the foil for this technologically tweaked society, but he has nothing to work with. Niccol, borrowing liberally from better projects (Soylent Green, Logan's Run, Harlan Ellison) turns his attempted metaphor into sludge. Narrative elements stagnate while concepts that could be exploited further (the fact that everyone looks like an advertisement for Abercrombie and Fitch, no matter the age) lay dormant and dying.
Even more disturbing is the plot logic involved in the whole 'time as money' ideal. If all you have to do is touch someone to transfer/take from the available balance, either with or without their consent, why aren't there criminals cruising around with baseball bats, beating people up and taking their minutes? Better still, what exactly are the Timekeeper's purposes? If a cult came along and saw all its members freely give their time to a false prophet leader, would they have the right to take his oddly earned eras back? From the bank vault holding an anticlimactic booty to the various stock graphics that use seconds like dividends, the whole premise is poorly thought-out...or perhaps, just poorly explained and examined.
At least Gattaca structured itself as a mystery, making identity and deception a key to its final twist. Here, there is nothing but the set-up restated over and over again. From his limited canon (S1mOne, Lords of War included), Niccol appears poised to become a relative one hit wonder. In Time won't change that determination.
