Ryan Reviews: In Time

So tonight I saw 'In Time', which I'm sure immediately reminds you of this...

But Bill and Ted couldn't possibly imagine the future their music would create, because in the future time becomes our economy (which is skipped over and put down to genetic modification, but whatever, it's not important)

In the future we won't have time to be excellent to each other.

Time is exchanged by people like money. You make transfers by holding arms and you earn time by working/selling, just like money (and like money, you never earn enough, but there is a reason for that and the film does manage to explain why). Everybody has a countdown on their arm and if that countdown reaches 000:000:00:00:00:00 you die with no hope of a time transplant or injection of time injected directly to the heart.

The movie itself is entertaining, but you do have to suspend your disbelief a fair bit to fully enjoy it. Try not to think about how the whole 'clocks in the arm' thing started and focus on the message about the economy and how it possibly relates to the current financial 'crisis'. 

Yeah, Greece.

I liked the whole Bonnie and Clyde/ Robin Hood thing but the time puns did get on my nerves a little. Here's an example, at one point Timberlake wants a rich guy to deposit 1000 years to be spread amongst a 'timeline'. What is a timeline? Well it is like a queue for people to be given time from a mission, like a soup kitchen... people 'lining up' for 'time'? Timeline! Another was the mention of storing time, apparently you can 'capsule' your time to keep it safe, because people can rob you of your time by holding your arm,

Rather than taking a moment of your time by talking at you.

Puns aside the movie as a whole is good fun, mostly, Timberlake loses his mother to inflation which is all very dramatic and the only real message I got was that there is a balance between rich and poor, if you give the poor more money (time) they won't work because they won't feel the need to and the system will halt, thus bringing the economic world to its knees. The other message I got was that bus drivers are dicks, but that's less a 'message' and more a 'fact'.

"What's that? 10p short? Oh well, looks like you're walking' - Dick

I would have liked to have found out more about Timberland's character's father, but that's not such a big deal. However Timberlake himself was sometimes a bit iffy as an actor, plus his character knows how to fight bad guys like Liam Neeson in Taken, which is both cool and confusing, cool because kicking ass is cool, confusing because he's just a guy from the ghetto, not a well trained special agent.

Toughest guy in the ghetto.

So it's good, not 'own it on DVD and watch it every week' good, more, 'rent it or see it once and enjoy it but don't expect it to blow your mind' good. It's an entertaining film with a basic plot, but not much else, but compared to Contagion, In Time is the greatest sci-fi movie ever made!

Pictured: Contagion, but with a girl in a bikini to add something interesting.