I went to go watch The Thing over the weekend (review forthcoming) and I caught an interesting preview that I noted to re-watch on Youtube when I got home. The preview was for the movie “In Time” starring Justin Timberlake.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-63vHi7pEM
Do the makers of this movie actually believe that they can substitute time for money and critique the capitalist system without the American people catching them on their little sneak job? They probably do, and they probably aren’t wrong for thinking that way.
We see early in the trailer that time is the new currency and a cup of normal coffee costs about four minutes. A minor fee compared to the 32 ounce energy drink which will take off about 9 minutes of your life. When Olivia Wilde’s character runs out of time and appears to die, we hear a voice that claims, “The poor are meant to die, it’s how the system works.” It’s the “poor” that are stomping around on Wall Street today attempting to break the “system”.Shortly after we get another voiceover stating, “No one should be immortal, even if one person has to die,” echoing one side of the health reform debate we have in our country. Although the cuts are short, as they are in any trailer, we often catch glimpses of tickers with numbers going across like they do in the stock market. Except this time, it’s not references to money going across your screen, it’s time sliding across.
I can’t say this movie will be all that good or that it has the makings to be a box office success from this trailer, but within the two minutes and thirty seconds, I have seen many interesting analogies to the real world. It might be worth a watch to see what sort of parallels they can make given feature length. Hopefully they are able to infuse the movie with some powerful social and political undertones without making it too cheesy.
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