Movie Review: In Time (2011)

Having a personal interest in the study of economics, I was fascinated by the premise of a world in which time has one left in his/her life could be exchanged. There are so many implications that this would have. In the Austrian school of economics, there is a large emphasis on time, and so I think its methodology would be well suited for analyzing this movie. First, let me list the premises of Timberlake's world: people are biologically engineered to live until their 25th birthday (from which they no longer age physically) and then have a year left (which is displayed on their arms), time can be traded among people through touching (or with a scanner, somewhat like one used for barcodes), time is the primary form of currency, and people are divided into different "time zones" which seemed to be based on their socioeconomic status. The movie begins with Timberlake waking up and not having much more than a day left. He goes about a normal day: goes to work to earn some time and spends his night at the bar. However, there is a man at the bar with more than a century left and is flashing his wealth. A gang comes to steal from him but Timberlake helps him escape. The man reveals to Timberlake that there is actually enough time for everyone but the rich keep it for themselves, gives him most of his time, and then leaves. And so Timberlake begins his quest to break the system that keeps the poor as wage slaves by robbing time banks and running from the time cops.

I was pretty disappointed with what was done with the story when they had such an interesting concept. It ended up just being a simple class-warfare, exploitation movie when it could have been a deep thought experiment in how much different the world would be if people could trade time. And they failed to think it all the way through. For example, if the human race were to survive under these conditions at all, I would expect there to be a majority of the population to be quite young, yet there were very few kids in the movie. Also, I would expect an armed revolution to be more prone to happening since people have very little to lose if they only have a few hours left to live. Austrian economics would lead us to the conclusion that people would have very high time preference (meaning that they are more concerned with present consumption than that of years later), which means that their saving would be lower (but there is a further complication in that their savings would be in years, but we'll disregard that). Without getting too technical, a higher savings rate means that there is more investment, and therefore more economic growth. But since people would have higher time preference, combined with the fact that most people would have less human capital than our world because the average age would be much younger, living standards should be much lower than displayed in the film.

But regardless of all these quibbles, let us just take the movie at face value and overlook the more subtle economic implications. Even then, they leave so many gaping holes in the story that its hard to make sense of it. The biggest one is that they never explain how "time" is created (as there is a vault in the movie containing a device which stores a million years, as well as banks with containers storing all kinds of time). Secondly, they never explain how the rich are able to steal time from the poor (it is just assumed that they do since they have so much more time). It's as if someone tried to write a Marxist allegory that has just as little understanding of economics in its story as in the real world. In our world, wealth has to be produced; it is not as if it all just existed and somehow the elite got more of it while the masses got little. In the movie, wealth just seems to exist. The film also doesn't seem to demonstrate any understanding of the structure of production: the rich just live somewhere else, seemingly not even participating in commerce with the underlings, but the rich exploit them somehow. Whatever it is, it cannot be a criticism of our world since it is too far removed from it.

Perhaps I over-analyzed In Time and this left me unsatisfied. It actually is somewhat entertaining, if only for the thought experiment, and it is useful, if only for exposing economic fallacies. Beyond its concept, don't expect anything groundbreaking. Perhaps if you lower your expectations enough, you won't end up as disappointed as I was.