Problematic Immortality and the Movie “In Time”

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immortality, In Time, movies, reviews

I recently reviewed In Time, the 2011 movie where time is currency.  Sicne writing that review, some other plot points relating to their concept of immortality really bothered me.

A quick recap for anyone who hasn’t heard of the movie: Time is now the currency.  Talk about high prices for coffee, it costs you four minutes of your life.  Everyone is born with a clock on their arm worth one year which begins to tick down when they turn twenty-five.  Time is earned and paid, added and subtracted with a stamp or twist of the arm.  When the clock starts ticking at age twenty-five, that’s it.  You stop growing, stop aging.  Your physical appearance never changes.

Ignoring how creepy it is to be the same physical age as your great grandmother, there’s more problems with this concept that the writers completely overlooked.  As Ermisenda commented, it’s a great concept, but it was not pulled off as well as it could have been.  Think about this for a moment, your physical appearance never changes.

There’s a scene where two of the characters discuss the moment their clock began to count down.  The girl said she looked in the mirror and marveled that she would never look any different.  I realize this is incredibly shallow, but how depressing!  I just got my hair cut, and I’m a little freaked out because it’s shorter than the picture I took in to show them what I wanted, but not being immortal, I have the bright light at the end of the tunnel that my hair will actually grow back.  Now take that to a more serious level.

Your genes have completely stopped.  What happens if you get sun burned?  What happens if you break your leg?  Does a doctor put you in a cast and you are just SOL forever?  What if you get shot, rip a nail off kicking your sheets (so incredibly painful), knock out a tooth?  The writers had a great concept with time being a currency, and they did present the concept that immortality is unnatural and not as great as it sounds on the surface, but after that they really missed the mark.  I revoke my original 3 star rating (I don’t think I actually mentioned a number) and give it a 2.  The improper use of Darwinism as an excuse for warped capitalism and the overlooked complications of the system of immortality has caused In Time to be less than satisfactory.  Am I over-thinking it?  Sure, so if you just want an action movie with a twist, it’s worth watching, otherwise not so much.

-Eliabeth Hawthorne

See the original review of In Time here.

Movie Review: In Time

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Gulliver's Travels, immortality, In Time, Tuck Everlasting

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.

__mere mortals

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beauty, books, doomed, envy, Everything is more beautiful because we're doomed., expiry, future, gods, immortality, life, movies, past, present, quote, supernatural, time, troy, values, vampire

“The Gods envy us. They envy us because we’re mortal, because any moment might be our last. Everything is more beautiful because we’re doomed. You will never be lovelier than you are now. We will never be here again.” – Troy

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I remember watching the Troy (2004) film a year after it was released and that quote has never left my mind. I remember enjoying the movie overall in my young adolescence and was surprised by the amount of negative reviews it received. I now, of course, have matured especially when it comes to what I value in a movie. Some might consider me a movie snob as I love many foreign films, art house films and the more subtle kind that don’t need expensive CGI, stereotype gender roles and predictable plotlines. Whenever I think back to Troy I can only ever remember that quote and I don’t dare to watch it again, in fear that it will ruin my positive experience of the film. I think many of us do that with some of our childhood films and such, don’t you?