Z/Web

I really wanted to like this. The scifi premise is intriguing: people have been genetically engineered to stop aging at age 25, but since that leads to overpopulation, people are also built with a genetic clock that causes them to die one year later. Thus time becomes invaluable, and the new currency. People pay with time — a cup of coffee, for instance, is four minutes off your life. Thus the wealthy can live forever by buying time from the poor who run out of time and die.

The problem with the film is that this interesting idea is poorly implemented. There are aspects that are fairly well done, but much isn’t explained and makes no sense. For instance, the genetic clock glows and ticks down on the person’s arm just like a digital clock. And somehow the people can shake hands a certain way to transfer time from one clock to another — that’s how things are paid for. But the way this works is bizarre, for sometimes it takes seconds to transfer centuries and other times just transferring a few minutes of time takes longer. Characters even “time fight” and are able to steal time from another person, yet we’re given zero explanation of how time is transferred. (If a person has to will it, then how could you still from them?)

What annoyed me the most is that the value of time is also inconsistent. If we equate it to dollars and use a $4 cup of coffee as our exchange rate, that means one minute of life is equal to a dollar. Under that rate, a whole day would be $1,440, a week $10,080, a month $43,200, and a year $524,160. A century would be about $50 million. As you can see, the value accelerates. Yet our characters start throwing out months and decades of time as though it’s not worth that much. Like when our hero goes to the rich part of town he gives the waitress a week’s worth of time as a tip when his meal cost a month! That doesn’t make much sense.

The story is also cumbersome, an odd mixture of the predictable and the interesting. As so often happens with a gimmicky premise, the writer seems to think that just having ordinary characters in this gimmicky setting is all that’s needed. There are a few scenes that stand out — the poor boy-rich girl love story is not bad and the Robin Hood premise also works. But the obvious flaws outweigh the good.

For instance, the main couple become bank robbers, stealing time and donating to the poor. They somehow manage these robberies with remarkable ease, often just waving a gun and receiving time capsules. Yet outside death is all around with desperate people with just minutes left to live before their time runs out… and not one of them decides to rob a bank to gain more life? You’d think in a society like that the violence would be uncontrollable.

The film ultimately succumbs to heavy-handed preaching on the evils of the rich versus the poor. These obvious lessons are doled out as though precious treasures, overemphasized and exaggerated to make sure we don’t miss them. This is ham-handedly done with zero attempt at subtlety: the rich are all portrayed as evil and the poor are all heroic. There actually is some gold to mine in this topic — I would love a serious exploration of some of these ideas — but this film handles it so ineptly that it’s pretty much a joke.

With the writing and acting all over the map (some good, some terrible), some over-the-top dramatic moments that are so silly you have to work to not burst out laughing (you know the moment’s supposed to be somber), and too much of the science fiction world left vague and unexplained and inconsistent, I can’t recommend this film at all. It has some intriguing ideas, but sadly it’s just wasted potential.