In Time | Film review

Andrew Niccol’s movies may be glib (Lord of War), but they’re rarely timid. With In Time, the Gattaca director serves up a retro-futurist allegory so flagrantly Marxist, even Metropolis-era Fritz Lang might have reached for the red pen. It helps that it’s Niccol’s most exciting film—a bold, sometimes exhilarating chase picture that might have claimed a place among the great L.A. noir dystopias with a steadier directorial hand.

The movie takes place in a world where humans are genetically engineered to live 26 years; any life beyond that must be bartered for in an economy that uses time as its only currency. The poor are permanently priced out of wealthy zones, and everything—from phone calls, worth seconds, to coffee, worth minutes—has a cost. In the ghetto, Justin Timberlake’s Will lives literally day-to-day. (In a noirish, Oedipal twist, his mother, looking great at 50, is played by 27-year-old Olivia Wilde.) Suddenly bequeathed an extra century, Will sets out to take down a fat cat (Vincent Kartheiser) and redistribute the planet’s years, making quite an impression on the magnate’s daughter (Amanda Seyfried).

Brace yourself for a lot of bloviating on Fox News about a film that promotes spreading the wealth, even while the network’s Murdoch sib, 20th Century Fox, reaps the box-office benefits of any controversy. The lurchy plotting is a distraction, as is the villains’ lemminglike tendency to gamble with their own lives (best arm-wrestling scene since The Fly). But with a generation set back in its lifetime earning potential, the notion of years as currency is a potent one. This is sci-fi for our era.