In Time

Dear Diary,

Before we called it a day (after chicken rice and bowling), Hubby treated us to a movie. He wanted to watch Justin Timberlake acts so we watched In Time. A film directed by Andrew Niccol and starred by Justin Timberlake, Amanda Seyfried, Olivia Wilde, Cillian Murphy, Alex Pettyfer, etc.

In Time is a futuristic movie that offers something different from the ordinary, a fresh unique perspective on life. Time is a commodity. It is used as currency. The more time you have, the richer you are. In this film, the rich gets richer while the poor gets poorer by the second. Every minute counts. You can see two types of societies that live worlds apart. The stark contrast of their lives is portrayed by how leisurely the rich sails through life and how desperately the poor survives.

The rich can live forever because time is on their side. If time is not your side, you’re constantly on the run or lookout for more time. The sense of urgency is cleverly build up by having everybody’s time displayed on their arms. Audience can feel the urgency because everybody knows how much time left for them. For example, if you have centuries clearly written on your arm, why worry right. But if you only have half an hour or worst several minutes, you’d be scurrying for more time. Or your time’s up and you die!

Another “fun” aspect is that age stops at 25 years. Everybody looks young even though their actual age is way over 25. There’s no aging in their dictionary and no single line of aging on their faces. Muda belia belaka! What I like most is that most male actors are handsome even the villains.

Back to Timberlake, he sure can act eh. He, who hails from the less fortunate side of the society, is wrongly accused of murder when he was left with decades of time from a very generous man. From then on, he is on the run from the time keeper (police). At some point, he meets Seyfried who is a daughter of a filthy rich businessman. She is one rebellious and headstrong girl. Somehow, they fell in love and collaborate in stealing time from the rich and distribute it among the poor. Some sort of modern Zorro eh? They try to bring about some equilibrium of wealth among the societies. The film’s tagline explains it fittingly – Live Forever or Die Trying.