Film Review: In Time

Working in Hollywood is hard. Being Andrew Niccol and working in Hollywood: even harder. Harder still without multimillion dollar clout behind you, for a writer-director specialising in ideologically charged fiction (science fiction or otherwise) such as Gattaca, Lord of War and S1m0ne. The only hit with his name being the The Truman Show, written by Niccol but directed solidly by workaday auteur Peter Wier. Niccol has struggled with success, putting aside bad luck if we narrow down a critical reason why his attempts usually tank, it’s the ideas themselves: Briefly intriguing premises derailed by feature length execution, In Time has the same problem. Its alternate world of (deep breath) genetically engineered humans who stop aging past 25, after that age bracket they literally live on shared time. Unfortunately, the previous eighteen words contain all the fascination you’re likely to squeeze out of this film. As a Twilight Zone episode, it would have legs. At an hour and a half, the idea demonstrates a lack of durability.

As entertainment, there isn’t much to be gained. The film’s sluggish pace and hackneyed writing poorly serve the game cast (one look at the poster say’s everything), the production design couldn’t be weaker. Dystopia regular Alex McDowell (the production designer behind Minority Report, Fight Club and Watchmen) is roped in to churn out a future of monochrome muscle cars decked out with pinball machine lights that vroom up and down LA’s all too familiar viaducts. Colleen Atwood’s wardrobe riffs shamelessly on Kym Barrett’s work on the Matrix trilogy and composer Craig Armstrong repeats all the beats from his soundtrack to Plunkett and Macleane (the go-to score for evoking the triumph of the human will over ‘The Man’).

The movie establishes a future where its inhabitants won’t age beyond 25. The age 25 in the film’s vernacular enabling perfect beauty and health, despite the story’s constant declaration of class disparity. This is a dystopia as imagined by the ‘casting couch’, arguably Niccol had already made this film with Gattaca, at least that film had a reason behind its premise of artificially cultivated beauty. With In Time, there is no reason for any of these characters to be beautiful. Made worse by the fact that a mainstream dystopia cannot survive without an anti-establishment, anarcho-syndicalist rhetoric charging blindly through any possible exploration of societal domination.

Following the now standard post-Matrix model of the dystopian narrative, unlike Orwells’ 1984, there is a happy ending and it’s all due to the power of the human spirit. Speaking of Matrix overtones, it seemed until now that the days of Armani-inspired tech-warriors and cyber-fear mongering – from Dark City to Equilibrium – had served their purpose and were long behind us. In Time sadly digs up the ghost of dystopia gone naïve and serves it up in the wrong decade. Its ham-fisted attempts at gouging at the economic crises will more than likely draw praise from the Occupy [insert establishment] crowd, but are nothing more than flimsy ideas dreamed up by a speculative think tank organised by hipsters.