In Time

Recommendation

This movie gets a recommendation from me, but I have a few specific things that perhaps bias my opinion. As a flat sci-fi action movie, I think this film works. There are aspects of a rags-to-riches story here that people may find entertaining. It falls back on a relatively anti-capitalist message which is a take you don’t typically see in mainstream blockbusters.

While I do think the story sort of gets lost in the weeds towards the end, the movie at no point drags. The characters are constantly on a ticking clock and death is always a few moments away, which keeps the stakes high. There are also a number of antagonistic groups at odds with the protagonist, so that there is a lot of variety in the types of villains that are encountered.

In the end it’s a fun action movie, plus an interesting premise, plus Cillian Murphy, plus a fair amount of anti-capitalist propaganda mixed in.

Thoughts

The Premise

I think there are a few unanswered questions about the premise that could have serious implications about the state of the world. I just want to explore some of them:

1. Does all of the wealth in the world come from the remaining year people get when they turn 25? If that’s the case, then there is a seriously dark implication that all of this collective wealth in the big cities is the direct result of millions of people who died before that 1 year was up.
2. Why do people have a ticking clock rather than the rich just living forever? I think that the premise is mostly in place for the allegory about capitalism which is why it’s not thoroughly explained, but I think if there had been rich people who didn’t even have clocks that would be an even more pointed commentary about the system. I guess it could be argued that the system appearing equal in theory is actually a close approximation to how actual capitalism works.

The movie has about 30 seconds of exposition to justify the entire premise which leaves a lot of unanswered questions. This may or may not be for the best. I think I prefer under-explanation to over-explaining every detail.

Anti-Capitalist Content

This movie is undeniably an allegory about the evils of Capitalism. The Sci-fi setting works around the defenses the audience has put in place to justify the same sort of real world desperation that poor people face. Tying the concept of wealth directly to living forever or dying at the drop of a hat makes it much easier to empathize with the poor people in the movie. I think people are hardened against the regular idea of poverty in a way that this movie sidesteps.

Then it takes the next step and gets people on board with the idea of redistributing the wealth. The movie tackles a lot of concepts about class struggle and reframes a lot of anti-capitalist talking points in a way that I felt like should be more digestible for a general audience.

I guess my only real issue with the film is that it gets to the point about redistributing the wealth and how the system just keeps altering to eventually put the power back into the hands of the few. At one point they even talk about how it will take several generations for the social order to recover if they redistribute all of the wealth, but the problem is that the social order is going to eventually go back to how it was because they aren’t planning to change the system.

I would’ve preferred an ending where the characters change the system rather than simply trying to redistribute the wealth while keeping wages in place. It might end up being too utopian a slant to be entertaining, but the actual ending where they are just robbing bigger and bigger banks felt a bit hollow to me. They don’t actually solve any of the problems that the society has in place.