What would you do with all the time in the world? Immortality has never interested me, probably because of books like Gulliver’s Travels and movies like Tuck Everlasting and now In Time.
Talk about a movie written for gorgeous young actors! In the movie, no one is every physically older than 25; they just stop aging. But there’s a catch: “for a few to be immortal, many must die.” Money is currency, it is earned and spent. Coffee is 4 minutes and a bus ride is two hours. Time is transferred by holding scanners to a person’s wrist or by holding hands. Arm wrestling takes on a whole new context as the flick of a wrist can mean the difference between life and death.
In Time Review
Meh. It’s got some good political themes, but they kept making reference to Darwinism and survival of the fittest as a justification for the rich hoarding time and making sure that the poor died before their time, but there’s no evolution. Traits that make certain genes “superior” are not getting passed down or weeded out. This arrangement with the clock on the arm seems to be a relatively new development. People reference being in their seventies or eighties, but no one was anywhere near 200 years old. People weren’t dying because their genes were inferior, they were dying because the rich raised the price of living in the poor districts, essentially stealing their life.
Other than that, it wasn’t a bad movie, but the beginning was better than the end. It had some great, thought-provoking quotes that overshadowed the rest of the movie. For me, the best part of the movie was practically in the opening scene when Matt Bomer’s character says “But the day comes when you’ve had enough. You’re mind can be spent, even if your body’s not. We want to die, we need to.”
Now it’s been YEARS since I’ve read Gulliver’s Travels, so leave a comment if you remember more about this section. There’s a point in the novel where a character is explaining that immortality is not everything it’s cut out to be. You live forever, but the mind only lasts so long before they’re basically a vegetable, a drain on their loved ones stuck with taking care of them. Not exactly the romanticized immortality people envision.
So, In Time is worth watching, but rent it or find it online. It’s not something I think I’ll watch again, but it was good to watch once and it has Matt Bomer in it.
Ermilia 
Haha @ the Darwin stuff! Good call!
Thank you ^^ it really bothered me. It wasn’t just one reference to Darwin, it was several through the entire movie. Someone did not do their homework OR was intentionally skewing the interpretation of Darwinism. Cannot be sure which.
In Webster’s KIss I pretend-wrote a novel about a different evolution where cacti evolved as the dominant species on a planet. In the real story, I ended up throwing that one away, because I just couldn’t make any logical sense of it. Sometimes I think authors get to a point where they put so much work into something, they refuse to toss it even though the basic premise turns out flawed. Here I think you’re dead right! If you’re going to rely on Darwinism, then survival that isn’t based on on genetic fitness is a comical misfire! (<– me not saying epic fail one time too many today)
ROFLMAO. That’s why I am SO thankful for Ermisenda. There was a scene in Blind Sight involving Odette, Claudia and Leo, and a chastity belt gag gift that mad it through several revisions until she made me get rid of it. Hind sight, it should have gone in the first revision, but it was so funny (to me) that I clung to it despite Ermi repeatedly asking me where Odette would get a chastity belt.
So many plots would make more sense if the writer was working with a partner.
Yeah, as funny as this all is, the serious side of that is really valuable! I think a good editor, not the dollar-per-correction kind, can offer the same kind of second perspective. Haha, there is a REASON Webster’s Kiss is still just sitting there!
It’s so hard to be your own judge. You loved the idea or you would never have written it. And you know… these things are our babies! That’s part of why I’ve spent so much time writing the comments I do… It allows me to write tons of text and then review it and delete it!
One of these days, I am going to share a set of them that passed screening btw…
So now back to the jocular… There is nothing wrong with posting outtakes! So where’s that chastity belt, girl?!!
You’re so right about that. We LOVED our editor (Karin Cox) who helped us cut down our 200k word behemoth into a nice 125k word novel (combined, not each). Some of it we agreed 100% and cut immediately, other parts we bickered over. You also have to realize we added tons, so probably less than half of the original work survived and the rest is on the cutting room floor. ^^ I’ll find some of the abandoned scenes to post, but the editing really isn’t that fantastic which is why we haven’t posted them before.
I’m just going to throw my 2 cents. (Ermisenda talking!) I think the concept was brilliant, the idea of “time” being the new currency, but I really didn’t feel like the movie delivered it’s true potential. I love quirky concepts like that but I had high expectations as a result. I felt like instead of turning this brilliant concept into a ground-breaking movie they just made a “cheap” entertainment flick. That’s probably what annoyed me the most, the potential of the movie which wasn’t fully tapped into.
– Ermisenda
Oh! (Ermisenda still jabbering on…) It actually made me want to write a book with a similar concept and I would – hopefully – allow the idea to reach it’s full potential in a novel. I’m still working on the idea. 😉
– Ermisenda
(Eliabeth) You’ve gotten me to write a second post. There were some other problems with the movie I didn’t think about until after I’d written the review. It will post tomorrow.
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