Plot: (borrowed and modified from IMDB)
In a future Los Angeles society, people are genetically modified to stop aging at 25 and after that a biological clock is activated granting one more year of life to each person. Everyone has a digital clock on the inside of one of their forearms that displays how much remaining time they have (the display characters are bioluminescent and are visible through the skin), and people can trade time by shaking hands. Time that can be added to or subtracted from one’s personal biological clock is the new currency: Working-class people are paid extra hours of life in exchange for their labor, everyday goods and services are bought using time, and rich people make money off of businesses that loan time to borrowers. When a person’s time runs out, they instantly die of a heart attack. People can also die from physical injury.
Poorer people commonly live on the edge of survival, with less than 24 hours of time remaining on their biological clocks each day. Rich people can have eons of time, making them effectively immortal. The rich are completely parasitic upon the poor and there’s no evidence of a democratic government, social programs or human rights. Rich people control all of the businesses and use a combination of low wages, deliberate price inflation, usurious time lending companies, and police violence to keep the masses too poor to think about anything but clocking in to the widget factory to make enough time to not die that day. The rich also occasionally turn those screws tight enough to kill off poor people when the ghettos get overpopulated.
The ultra-stratified socioeconomic order is further cemented by legal housing segregation, with walls separating rich and poor neighborhoods, which are referred to as different “Time Zones” (this movie is full of “time”-related puns like that). Tolls to pass through the gates are set too high for the poor to afford it.
In other words, this is liberal Hollywood’s vision of how the world works, taken to a comical extreme.
Justin Timberlake plays a typical wage slave named “Will Salas.” His dad is dead, he lives in a run-down apartment with his mom, and he works on a dreary factory assembly line. One day, he’s hanging out at a local bar when he meets a depressed and suicidal rich guy named “Henry Hamilton.” Timberlake saves him from getting robbed of his 100 years of time, and the two hide from the roving ghetto criminals in an abandoned building overnight. While waiting for daylight, they talk, and Henry Hamilton (who looks 25 years old like everyone else) reveals that he is 105 and sick of living. He also tells Timberlake–who apparently is uneducated and never questioned his bad lot in life–that society is setup in a fundamentally unfair way, and that there’s no reason why time can’t be distributed more evenly throughout the population.
Timberlake’s own life story and personality inspire Henry, so while Timberlake is asleep on the couch, Henry grabs his hand and transfers 100 years of time to him. Henry then jumps off a bridge.
Rather than indulge in a life of luxury for once, Timberlake’s fortunes nosedive immediately: After the police find Henry’s dead body and see surveillance camera footage of Timberlake in the area right after, they assume it was a murder-theft and Timberlake becomes a wanted man, with a stereotypical cold, obsessed detective (played by Cillian Murphy) leading a squad to chase him down. His first day as a rich guy gets worse after he donates 10 years of time to his best friend, who promptly uses it to drink himself to death at a bar, and then even worse that night when Timberlake’s mom runs out of time and dies a few seconds before he can grab her hand and do a time transfer.
A broken man with nothing to lose anymore and a new awareness of the exploitative structure of society, Timberlake sets out to take revenge on the evil rich people. Once he gets into the rich Time Zone, called “New Greenwich,” he sets his sights the tycoon “Philippe Weis,” who made a fortune from a chain of usurious time-lending businesses in the ghettos, and on his beautiful daughter Sylvia.
I won’t totally ruin the ending, but unsurprisingly for a simplistic movie like this, good beats evil and the underdog hero gets the girl at the end. Watch it or not. This is no Citizen Kane.
I thought In Time was a superficial movie that made me a little sick with its moralizing. Its deathism also made my eyes roll, with Timberlake and other characters spouting out epic-sounding lines like “No one should be immortal.” That bravado sounds great until you realize that the same rhetoric could be used to justify denying life saving medical technologies to dying people today. Like a fool who likes to watch boxing matches while yelling at the TV set that he could easily beat up one of the professional fighters, everyone is stoic and tough-talking about death until they have to face it, in which case 99% of people plead for God, weep like babies, and will use any technology to live just one more day. I expected nothing better from this film, but it disappointed me nonetheless.
Also, the movie should have been at least 20 minutes shorter. During the last half of it, I felt stuck in a time loop (pun intended) where Timberlake, Sylvia, and the police played an aimless and repetitive game of cat-and-mouse. The acting was “OK,” but there clearly wasn’t much of a budget since they used the same L.A. River stretch and film studio back lot for shooting most of the movie’s scenes.
A year isn’t given for the movie’s events, and I doubt the filmmakers intended for it to be an accurate depiction of the future (e.g. – humans are still working in factories and no attempt was made to put futuristic technology in the film, except electric cars), so it’s hard for me to gauge the film’s probable accuracy. This is social commentary about capitalism’s exploitation of the poor in the present day. However, let me do a calculation so we’ll have something to go on: I think medical immortality–which is a “close enough” stand-in for an end to aging once you hit 25–will exist in the year 2100. The character Henry Hamilton is 105, making him the oldest person in the movie that we know of. Making the assumption he was 25 in the year 2100 when the cure for aging was discovered, In Time is set in 2180.
For that year, In Time actually depicts the future accurately where it tries to.
Medical immortality will create a world full of young, beautiful people. All of the actors and extras look to be in their 20s and are physically attractive. There wasn’t one obese person in the whole movie. I agree that the overwhelming majority of humans alive in 2180 will look young and attractive thanks to technology.
Medical immortality, technologies that can halt or reverse the aging process, and advanced plastic surgery techniques should be commonly available by then. In addition, ordinary people will be the beneficiaries of several successive generations of human genetic engineering, meaning congenital health defects and even cosmetic imperfections (baldness, abnormally tall or short height, small breasts, etc.) will be almost entirely excised from the human gene pool. Prices for all of these things should also be very low thanks to patent expirations, free machine labor, and government reimbursement (e.g. – Medicaid pays for genetically engineering your children).
However, just as there are Amish people today, I think in 2180 there will be humans who eschew such technologies for various reasons, meaning there will still be some old-looking and ugly people. There very well could have been such people in the film universe, but they just weren’t shown because the movie only focused on what was happening to a relatively small group of people in Los Angeles.
I’d also imagine the already existing trend for people to generally become more courteous and respectful as they age would continue, even if their looks stayed youthful. The good manners displayed by the rich people in the movie are probably an accurate depiction of how people will act in the distant future, when the average person has over 100 years of life experiences, mistakes, relationships, and hard knocks.
Parents will look and act the same age as their kids. The “ageless” nature of society is hit home early in the movie when Timberlake is first shown in his apartment with a beautiful young woman he startlingly calls “Mom.” She’s actually in her 40s and Timberlake is 28. Even 105-year-old people like Henry Hamilton look to be in their 20s. This would definitely be the consequence of age-manipulation technologies, and in 2180, it will be common for parents, children, and even grandparents/children to look the same age.
Also, radical extensions to human lifespan will upend the natural familial and generational relationships between parents and offspring as the initial maturity and life experience advantages held by the parent get vanishingly small over time. For example, if you’re 10 and your mom is 40, she is definitely wiser than you. But what if you’re 110 and she’s 140? How much of an edge does her extra 30 years of life give her over you at that point? Could you have even caught up to or surpassed her if you spent your adult years being more active and doing more enriching things?
Once we end aging, we will invariably end up in a world where parents and children converge to the same physical and mental state in the long run. It’s likely we’ll come to think of our parents and children more like siblings.
Also, the film highlights a funny consequence of this in a scene where the bad guy tycoon Philippe Weis is at a fancy party with three young beautiful woman at his side, and Timberlake can’t tell at first glance how they’re related to him (Mother? Wife? Daughter? Granddaughter?), which complicates his strategy for approaching them. I actually don’t think this will be a problem in 2180 because humans will have cybernetic enhancements that will automatically scan and identify the people around them.
Eternal life might make people more risk-averse. When Timberlake goes to New Greenwich, he falls in love with Philippe Weis’ daughter, Sylvia. She’s a fusion of the classic Hollywood “forbidden fruit” and “rebellious princess” tropes, and waxes about her boredom with rich life and her uninformed belief that the poor get more out of life since they’re always on the verge of running out of time and dying. To show what a romantic badass he is, Timberlake dares her to go swimming in the ocean at night, which she initially refuses to do because she’s been conditioned to avoid dangerous activities. Medical immortality will indeed make people more risk-averse since they’ll have more to lose in a sense, but I doubt it will get so bad the people won’t want to do common things like swim in the ocean anymore.
By 2180, our bodies and the world around us will be infused with intelligent technology, which will go a long way towards mitigating risks to human life. An average human in that year will probably have cybernetic implants and wearable devices that continuously monitor their environment, calculate risk probabilities, and warn them of unsafe conditions or bad decisions they seem to be contemplating. There will also be robots everywhere that can rescue humans or render medical aid. This might get the point where every human has to be followed around by a helper robot and/or can have their actions canceled out by remote signals sent to their cybernetic implants (think of a technological nanny state where the government can make you instantly pass out if you start acting stupid). Given all the safeguards that will be in place, humans might be able to take more “risks” each day than you might think.
By 2180, humans might also make periodic “backups” of their minds using some kind of brain scanning technology. AIs will definitely back themselves up constantly, along with taking other measures to protect their lives, like distributing their consciousness among many different servers in different locations, which each server heavily protected against physical attack and computer viruses. Even if one server were destroyed, a duplicate could be instantly created and added to the network using a backup of the destroyed server’s data. By the same token, if one of your brain cells dies, your remaining brain cells can quickly do some neural re-wiring to compensate, and your consciousness does not die.
People will be able to transfer things by holding hands. In the movie, people can trade time by holding hands. As one person’s time decreases, the other person’s increases by the same amount, and their forearm digital clocks rapidly change to reflect this. I think by 2180, it will be common for humans to have cybernetic implants, organs, and body parts, and those artificial systems will allow people to transfer electricity, data, nanomachines, and maybe their thoughts and feelings through physical contact (just imagine all humans having the equivalent of a USB plug built into the palms of their hands). Wireless transmission of data and maybe even electricity will also be possible.
In a way, it might be possible to transfer “life” to a dying person in the future by holding their hand and transferring electricity to recharge their batteries, nanomachines to repair their tissue damage, or data to fix some malfunction in their computer implants.
There will still be poor people and human factory workers. Absolutely not. The poorest person in 2180 will have a much better life in most ways than the richest person today, mostly thanks to better technology. Wealth and income disparities could still exist, and purely biological humans will probably find themselves in the lowest socioeconomic stratum, but poverty as we know it will be a distant memory. Factories will also be completely automated.