by Benjamin Lomax

Created on: December 09, 2011   Last Updated: December 12, 2011

“In Time” is a modern dystopic science fiction movie most closely akin to “Logan’s Run” but with a much grittier realistic feel and certainly much better (though subtly utilized) special effects. Starring beautiful people like Justin Timberlake, Olivia Wilde, and Sylvia Weis certainly doesn’t hurt anything. In fact, while as a science fiction epic this movie is nothing ground-breaking, this is yet another opportunity for Timberlake to prove that he can legitimately carry a movie. Almost every scene of the movie has him in it, and his pathos in relation to his world and to the other characters is palpable. In a movie that had to be star-driven, the former mouseketeer pulls it off.

In Time is set in the not so far-off future year of 2161. In this world, time is money, quite literally. A cure for aging has been discovered that stops all aging-related degeneration at age 25, including apparently removing any diseases. This creates a perpetual youth atmosphere where everyone is the same age except those younger than 25. But the cure is not evenly distributed, as the wealthy have virtually unlimited life, while the poor masses scramble to restore the internal clock, paying for everyday expenses like rent and food with time they accrue by working. Of course, the system is corrupt as the wages continually decrease and the expenses increase. This allows for the rich to become richer and the poor poorer; in this case literally rushing them to their graves. Not the most original concept in the world of fiction, but well-conceived.

The time clock is visible as a long number along the inside of the right arm. The wealthy have as much as thousands of years of life, while many are scrambling to keep enough hours to live another day, unable to afford to go to sleep. An intriguing concept is a sort of arm-wrestling where one participant may siphon off the time from another person, a popular sport in the seedy underworld bars. This appears to be the specialty of Will Salas (Timberlake’s character) and was of his father, who died mysteriously.

The plot in summary is Salas’ character driven to ever-increasingly desperate gambles to provide life for himself and his excessively hot (and the same age as he is) mother (played by Wilde), with whom he appears to have far more chemistry than the female lead, jaded rich girl Sylvia Weis (played by Amanda Seyfried), who is the daughter of an extremely wealthy banking magnate, Phillip Weis

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