In Time (2011)
Directed by Andrew Niccol
In the not-too-distant future, the aging gene has been switched off. To avoid overpopulation, time has become the currency and the way people pay for luxuries and necessities. The rich can live forever, while the rest struggle to negotiate for their immortality. A poor young man who suddenly comes into a fortune of time finds himself on the run from a corrupt police force known as the "time keepers".
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Although it could be accused of being stitched together from parts of lots of movies – “Logan’s Run,” “Timer,” “The 39 Steps” and even this year’s “The Adjustment Bureau” – its concept feels like a fresh attempt to combine pulpy storytelling with a socially conscious theme.
Set in an unspecified future where people are genetically programmed to time out at the age of 25, the film echoes Michael Anderson's 1976 hoot Logan's Run, whose characters were catapulted into the sky at 30 unless they did a runner.
Borrowing a dash from Logan's Run and a dollop from Bonnie and Clyde, the concept is that in the near future, time has become the most precious commodity.
The movie, which initially sounded like a rip-off of Logan’s Run, turns out to be a diatribe against the widely loathed 1 percent, who, even in this pop fantasy, still control the large majority of the world’s wealth.
Nothing remarkable about this futuristic adventure that reminds me a bit of “Logan’s Run.” Grade: D+…
) Niccol was almost certainly thinking more about the ’70s and ’80s dystopian tradition of “Logan’s Run,” “Soylent Green” and “The Running Man” than about contemporary politics.
Before long, Niccol morphs In Time into a yarn that borrows liberally from Robin Hood and Bonnie and Clyde as Will and Sylvia race around determined to steal from the rich and give to the poor.
Borrowing a dash from Logan's Run and a dollop from Bonnie and Clyde, the concept is that in the near future, time has become the most precious commodity.
Drawing on movies like Gun Crazy, Thieves Like Us and, of course, Bonnie and Clyde, Niccol gives us a combination crime spree/love story.
Writer/director Andrew Niccol’s plodding Logan’s Run-meets-Bonnie and Clyde pastiche takes its vacuous emoting and C-grade plotting very seriously, but the whole thing ultimately becomes nothing more than a dumbed down, tarted-up riff on his earlier film Gattaca (1997).
As previously mentioned, from this moment on the film officially becomes a game of cat and mouse with a bit of Bonnie and Clyde subtext thrown in for good measure.
Set in an unspecified future, In Time owes as much to The Marx-Engels Reader as Bonnie and Clyde.
As lame as its tone-deaf title, “In Time” is the latest dystopian vision from New Zealand-born writer/director Andrew Niccol (“Gattaca,” “S1m0ne,” “Lord of War”), a filmmaker whose mother apparently hit him over the head with a copy of George Orwell’s “1984” when he was an infant.
Writer-director Andrew Niccol (Gattaca, S1m0ne) has hit on a smart concept, then takes it nowhere.
It's a high concept that's fully explored by writer/director Andrew Niccol (who wrote and helmed Gattaca and penned The Truman Show), but the plot itself is a pretty standard, albeit enjoyable, poor-boy-meets-rich-girl chase yarn.
"In Time" is the work of writer-director Andrew Niccol, whose genetic-engineering thriller "Gattaca" is one of the smarter sci-fi movies of recent years, referenced by Ph.D.s and used to teach bioethics at universities.
Writer-director Andrew Niccol got more mileage out of the eugenically perfect world of haves and have-nots in the semi-classic Gattaca, but here he runs out of time to explain his theme.
2011 has been a great year for high-concept science fiction, so it was only a matter of time before the other shoe dropped and we'd get a real stinker, and it's truly a shame that it comes from filmmaker Andrew Niccol, whose earlier sci-fi movie "Gattaca" is still cited as one of the better original sci-fi concepts of recent years.
As lame as its tone-deaf title, “In Time” is the latest dystopian vision from New Zealand-born writer/director Andrew Niccol (“Gattaca,” “S1m0ne,” “Lord of War”), a filmmaker whose mother apparently hit him over the head with a copy of George Orwell’s “1984” when he was an infant.
Writer-director Andrew Niccol (Gattaca, S1m0ne) has hit on a smart concept, then takes it nowhere.
New Zealand-born writer-director Andrew Niccol, he of “Gattaca” and “S1m0ne,” has been making chilly, satirical, almost-excellent science-fiction movies and thrillers for years; he cannot possibly have known that this particular one — which advocates nothing short of full-on class warfare — would land right on top of the Occupy Wall Street moment.
The director, Andrew Niccol, previously wrote and directed such weird-science specials as Gattaca and S1m0ne, so you’d think he would know his way around this territory.
Writer/director Andrew Niccol consistently has used fantasy to explore troublesome social issues -- genetic engineering in "Gattaca," deceptive mass media in "The Truman Show," manufactured celebrity in "S1m0ne."
This is one of those Big Metaphors that writer/director Andrew Niccol ("Gattaca," "S1m0ne") specializes in, and even he doesn't seem to have the creative control on this one that he did on those, he's such an interesting thinker that his ideas glide you through the dumb-dumb action scenes and clumsy narrative.
Gattaca offers a glimpse of how he can spin science fiction concepts into a complex web and Lord of War is an underrated action film with a satirical bite.
Instead, believe it or not, the film is an original work, written and directed by Andrew Niccol (2005's " Lord of War ") in an era where creative output is frowned upon in Hollywood.
Clever and unsettling, this thriller by Andrew Niccol (Gattaca, Lord of War) takes place in a dystopian future when humans have been bioengineered to stop aging at 25 years; after that, they're allowed to live only 12 more months, though minutes can be added or deducted like currency through an embedded digital timer (a bus fare shaves two hours off your life, a sports car 59 years).
(His previous films include "Gattaca" and the less well-regarded "Simone"; he also wrote "The Truman Show" and more recently wrote and directed the arms-dealing picaresque "Lord of War.")
As lame as its tone-deaf title, “In Time” is the latest dystopian vision from New Zealand-born writer/director Andrew Niccol (“Gattaca,” “S1m0ne,” “Lord of War”), a filmmaker whose mother apparently hit him over the head with a copy of George Orwell’s “1984” when he was an infant.
He cooked up the excellent "Lord of War" in 2005 with Nicolas Cage as a mad-genius arms dealer.
It’s a cool-looking, medium-budget futuristic nightmare in the post-Orwell, post-”Blade Runner,” post-”Matrix” vein, neither the best nor worst example you’ve ever seen.
Even with its thoughtful nods to “Bonnie & Clyde” and “Les Miserables,” “In time” never delivers that transcendent “Blade Runner” moment, and never rises above cult classic to simple classic.
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Framing (and accentuating) her bulging eyes and Angelina Jolie lips with long bangs and flippy pageboy, he's clearly trying to evoke Anna Karina , Godard 's luminous muse in New Wave classics like " Band of Outsiders " and " Pierrot Le Fou ."
Framing (and accentuating) her bulging eyes and Angelina Jolie lips with long bangs and flippy pageboy, he's clearly trying to evoke Anna Karina , Godard 's luminous muse in New Wave classics like " Band of Outsiders " and " Pierrot Le Fou ."
As lame as its tone-deaf title, “In Time” is the latest dystopian vision from New Zealand-born writer/director Andrew Niccol (“Gattaca,” “S1m0ne,” “Lord of War”), a filmmaker whose mother apparently hit him over the head with a copy of George Orwell’s “1984” when he was an infant.
It reminded me of Kurt Wimmer’s infamous dystopian failure, Equilibrium.
But writer-director Andrew Niccol addresses it all with the overwrought grimness of Equilibrium or Minority Report , albeit with less visual flash.
Drawing on movies like Gun Crazy, Thieves Like Us and, of course, Bonnie and Clyde, Niccol gives us a combination crime spree/love story.
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Drawing on movies like Gun Crazy, Thieves Like Us and, of course, Bonnie and Clyde, Niccol gives us a combination crime spree/love story.
Niccol hasn’t just made a Marxist B-movie (see also: John Carpenter’s “They Live”), he’s made one in which 27-year-old Olivia Wilde plays the mother of 30-year-old Timberlake.