Time is money is time

MANILA, Philippines - It’s a twisted, cautionary tale that might as well have a big metaphor crawler running below the screen for the duration. For In Time, Justin Timberlake (as Will Salas) and actress-of-the-moment Amanda Seyfried (Sylvia Weis) find themselves in a world where time is money and money buys time — quite literally.

Imagine waking up one day to see your time slipping away — in years, hours, minutes and seconds. Nope, not in a cool costly Rolex but via an embedded neon green digital timer on your forearm. It just sits there day and night, with a sickly green glow that drives you mad with its unstoppable countdown to zero. That’s what’s eating mankind on In Time. People are mostly preoccupied with earning a paycheck to extend their lives. Consider that each person is destined to live to a ripe old 26 (though they stop aging at 25).

Now, we cannot have an interesting movie piggybacked on that one overarching rule, right? Of course not. Writer/director Andrew Niccol must think the same thing, so he throws in some variables. Yes, we ought to die at 26, but we can do things to extend our lives. We can earn extra time by working, arm-wrestling and even begging for it.

You can even win time at the casino, where the high-stakes players bet centuries. Crime is still present in this improbable world – you can lose your life if you get mugged and unwillingly get your time siphoned off his time. Sounds insane? Well, substitute “money” for “time” and it doesn’t seem so bonkers.

Will and Sylvia live on both sides of town literally and figuratively — she in pomp and comfort, he among the dregs of society. Of course, the poor have less time and the rich have more — much more. Keeping the status quo of inequality is the government (as in real life?). Cillian Murphy, as the Timekeeper, monitors the allocation of years per sector like a hawk. Thus, when Will suddenly “inherits” a century from a stranger who later commits suicide by letting his time run out, the Timekeeper becomes very interested.

Premised on a future setting, one can be forgiven for asking why the In Time set doesn’t look so sleek? I mean, if mankind was able to apply his warped vision on getting a chance at immortality, why did his sense of taste get flushed down the toilet? The modern city looks Gotham-y at best, and the cars are awful. And doesn’t it strike you as bananas that just when he (supposedly) conquers disease and aging, man puts in an unnecessary expiration date? More importantly, doesn’t it make us cattle to be willing participants in this stupidity?

One may see In Time as a variation on the vampire theme. The common line that runs through both is a fascination with immortality. Time is, after all, the ultimate commodity. It is the leveler that has remained unchanged through the eons. It moves inexorably forward. Rich and poor alike, our time will eventually run out. We all like to think we could buy time, when all we need to be a master of time is to be free from counting the minutes and hours and days and get to actually live the most of them.

Oh, guess what. Time’s up.