Click here for the review of In Time

SPOILERS must be tagged with the "SPOILER" tag!

Well seeing as I liked The Island, so i'll probably like this one as well. Here's Ebert's review

http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20111026/REVIEWS/111029992

I'm willing to bet this is as dumb as dumb gets, or James, you would have given it more stars.
It's allegory is clear: "Time is Money". Literally. So it treats time as money. And I am sure, in a severely Marxist manner.

I am sure "time" is treated as a zero sum game, and the rich are exploiting the poor. Hence the "robin hood" plot.
(By the way, if wealth were a zero sum game, when a population doubles, each of their shares of wealth would necessarily halve. It doesn't happen that way...) I'm tempted to see the movie full-price just to see if this dull Marxist approach is all the movie is, but then I'd be pissed off at having given them my bucks. I'll have to wait for discount theaters to see if I'm right.

And what a movie this could make if it turned out to be smart!

What about thieves (eg muggers) who "steal time"?
What about some characters who drive hard bargains, conserving their time? Rich characterizations there! Others who throw it away on a whim? There are even comedic possibilities; straight pure comedy or very dark comedy...

Do they show a night of debauchery, where someone throws away so much of their time in that one evening, that their horror the next morning upon waking could practically be worth the ticket price for the whole movie?

So many possible tiny subplots - eg unions preventing unscrupulous "bosses" from exploiting their time. A one-minute subplot, a side conversation, that one, provoking thought.

It could be a very, very rich movie. Instead, I'm betting with a silly, simple Marxist approach, it's just dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb.

My instant assumption was that the allegory was about class war and how the media keep the 'war' fuelled and burning with no solution in sight (just for the record, I believe class discrimination is more complex than the one sided view held by many).
I agree totally with your ideas, especially the one about 'spending' all your time in one go by accident! However I also agree that the almost certainly obvious Marxist tone will just make this another tedious lecture in 'what's wrong with the world'.

I saw a trailer for this movie the other day and was intrigued by the basic concept (time as currency). However a gaping flaw in the plan is already bothering me; how does the Mother manage to keep herself alive for 25 years and then suddenly make such a colossal cock up? I'm aware that 'accidents happen' but the error seems jarring and out of character (and I haven't even seen the movie yet!)
Of course the movie could be using this point for a big reveal later on concerning a 'conspiracy' of sorts but I'm guessing from the review that no such cleverness occurs?

I just got back from the film and I very much enjoyed it adn can say it's definitely not Marxist(a word that I truly HATE seeing so widely misused), so i'll answer your questions. There are thieves in the called "Minutemen" who steal from others in the ghetto. This film is plenty thought-provoking despite what the trailer may lead you to believe, there's much more emphasis on story thne action contrary to what JB says, there is one fanscinating part, Will gives his best friend 10 years(because that's how many years they've known each other) and later in the film when he comes back to his friend's wife, she reveals that .The villains aren't totally one-dimensional either, they reason that giving too much time to the lower-class citizens would ruin the system and hurt people more then help them in the long run. The timekeeper who is obsessed with catching Will is only interested in upholding the law and refuses to take a bribe from Weiss despite him not having it much better then the lower-class citizens(it's mentioned that timekeepers themselves get lower salaries to discourage theft). The Minutemen pride themselves on keeping order in the ghetto and don't like to kill people in cold blood, they prefer to give them a fighting chance. As for the acting, Justin Timberlake conitnues to impress me, I first noticed him in the underrated Edison Force, and he's quickly proving himself to be a very capable singer-turned actor, Seyfriend unfortunaely gets a rather thinly written character, but she still does pretty well with what she's given. This film ends on a perfect note that reveals just enough to leave you satisfied without feeling contrived.

Dragonbeard-The mother dies because the bus fare home is raised from one hour to two hours(the rich keep on raising the prices in the lower class time zones so that people there will keep dying because they literally can't afford to live and the rich have space so that they themselves can keep on living) and she only has 90 minutes left to live, and she just couldn't run fast enough to make it in time(no pun intended) so she didn't screw up, the system just royally screwed her over.

The concept behind this film sounds really interesting, but I just can't handle any film with Justin Timberlake in it. He basically uses the same smarmy, smirky persona in every film he has been in. What works in SNL skits does not work in actual acting. I didn't think he did any actual acting in The Social Network and fared poorly against the leads Garfield and Eisenberg. He has been made a lead in this movie because producers think his fan base will follow him to a movie and I suppose he isn't worse than Taylor Lautner in terms of ability, but that isn't saying much. The guy is a talented musician, but that doesn't make him an actor, and no one seems to have told him that.

That makes loads more sense! I could still pick holes but I think I should watch the film first to see if these get filled in, since they are all circumstantial.

Bit of a spoiler Vexer, no?

The trailer clearly shows the mother dying and it happens pretty early in the film, so it's not really a spoiler.

Sadly, I think the concept outrageously stupid. We have to wait for genetic engineering to reach a point where, not only can we switch off the aging gene, but we can also produce instant death when the clock runs out. Ah, yes, the clock and the time transfer system. From birth, humans grow an LED display that counts time left and there's hard wiring to transfer time units. This transfer system is controlled by the mind. People can intellectually specify the volume of units to be exchanged. They can also "fight" each other, i.e. lock mind-to-mind and the winner runs down the other's clock. Once all this technology is developed, someone then has to sell this to everyone. No-one has been allowed to opt out. So what happened to the Land of the Free? How come everyone agreed to sign up to this oppressive system? Rationality matters when it comes to the creation of a dystopia. It's reasonable when it comes to a society drifting inadvertently into a path to perdition. But no society would ever agree to adopt this particular package. I could go on but that would involve detailed spoilers. Suffice it to say that almost everything you see on the screen ranks as being almost completely idiotic in science fiction terms. Shame really but, as the idiom says, you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear and the ear devised by Niccol has to be from the runt of the sty. No matter what you give the actors to do, nothing can rescue this.

YEAH!! i fucken HATE IT when movies are not exact replications of real life.

Assuming that you're being sarcastic, that's a pretty big distortion of what dmar91 seems to be getting at. For any work of fiction, the audience has to suspend it's disbelief. at least to some extent, in order for the story to work. If the work strikes a particular individual as too unrealistic, that person won't be able to suspend their disbelief enough for the story to work for them. Whether or not something is "too unrealistic" will vary for person to person, and even for the same person, from one work to another (for example, most of us are going to be more willing to accept unrealistic elements in a slapstick farce than in a serious slice-of-life character study). I simply interpret dmar91's post as him saying that he doesn't "buy into" the film's premise enough to enjoy it, and frankly, from the review, neither do I.

If you aren't being sarcastic, I have no reply.

Honestly, Mike, do you know ANYTHING about Andrew Niccols?

Your post has got to be about the most short-sighted and "dumbest" I have ever seen on these boards.

James was 90% correct in his review IMO. I'm not sure where the story would go in such a way that a movie like this could even get made (though, i guess Gattaca didn't need that element, so maybe James is 95% correct.)

However, the story is brilliant, and the way it unfolds, while not really explaining in depth how the "market" works, it was still a fascinating sci-fi, not on par with Gattaca but close.

Jame's uses The Island as a comparison, I use Logan's Run. But all 3 are in the same boat, it's just the conceptualization and the delivery are getting much better as "time" goes on.

The other thing James is correct in say that this would have been an TERRIFIC TV show. I am not sure how this was missed.

You really think eXterminus wasn't being sarcastic? It was dripping...

Also, this is Science Fiction. This story has a broad history. Limited time, time as a commodity, class struggles, the genius of how time is understood and transferred. dmar91 is assuming he knows too much about the story.

I think dmar91 is right to an extent, the story doesn't 'appear' to stand up to much scrutiny. The mum thing especially! (more on that when I actually see it) however the core concept is what interests me (time as a commodity and life force etc).

Another movie that springs to mind when this is brought up is 'Avatar'. Probably the biggest 'refrigerator movie' I've ever seen. And yet somehow it is the biggest thing since the wheel (I say somehow, it's obvious how it happened but let's not bring that up again).