Movie Trailer: : Q: The Winged Serpent (1982)

CULT MOVIE REVIEW: Rollerball (1975)

"Corporate society takes care of everything. And all it asks of anyone, all it's ever asked of anyone ever, is not to interfere with management decisions."

- Corporate Executive, Bartholomew (John Houseman) explains how it is in Norman Jewison's Rollerball (1975) 

Released the same year as the low-budget Death Race 2000 (1975),  director Norman Jewison's Rollerball is a dystopian film with many similar elements.  Both films are set in the future.  Both films involve "athletes" in incredibly dangerous contests, and both efforts suggest the notion of such violent contests as "bread and circuses" for the unhappy masses of America. 

When the chips are down, give us our gladiatorial games, and we'll forget that we don't have our liberty...

Of course, Death Race 2000 is more over-the-top, funny,and nasty in execution, and so Rollerball feels a bit reserved and staid by comparison.  And yet Rollerball is grave, impressive, and serious in its depiction of a corporate dystopia.   The film thrives on speed, acceleration and movement, and James Caan is a sturdy anchor in this tale of a world in which corporations use blood lust to control the people.

Not all critics agreed.  Writing in The Film Encyclopedia, Science Fiction (page 327), a reviewer complained the film was "overly complicated" and mixed "political intrigue and romance for no purpose." 

Others felt the film was just a cover for violence itself.  Writing in Sci-Fi Now (Octopus Books, 1977), author Alan Frank noted that the film merely created a "special environment in which the film's use of excessive use of violence can be made justified." 

By pointed contrast, recent assessments of Rollerball have been more positive.  Film Threat noted that Rollerball was "prescient about violence, corporations, and TV," and that's certainly a fair assessment.  The film is a valuable one because it questions what passes for entertainment, but more than that, what passes for "freedom" in an increasingly technological, media-saturated age.

"Ladies and gentlemen, will you stand please for the playing of our Corporate Hymn?"

 Rollerball's action takes place after the world's nations have gone "bankrupt," and after the destructive "Corporate Wars" have come and gone 

Now, corporations "take care of everyone," and the violent, team sport of Rollerball has been created by big business to remind people of "the futility of individual effort."  The goal of the corporations is to be essential to every individual's life, and for "the few" to make important decisions on "a global basis."

Unfortunately, there are serious downsides to corporate rule as depicted in Rollerball.  For one thing, all citizens are treated as powerless employees of the "Executive Class."  This means that your beloved wife can be transferred to another man's possession with the ease an on-the-job departmental transfer.  Indeed, this is the indignity that the world's greatest Rollerball player, Jonathan E. (James Caan) has suffered...and never forgiven.   He still loves his wife, but an executive in Italy had more power and stature...and took her.  And she was paid handsomely to leave Jonathan, rewarded with a villa in Rome, and extreme wealth. 

Early in Rollerball, the company -- represented by John Houseman's stern executive, Bartholomew -- also delivers another despotic edict: Jonathan must retire from the game for "the common good."   This demand doesn't sit well with Jonathan E., and he encourages his ever-increasing fame on the court, even in the face of attempts by the company to kill him.  

Before long, Jonathan finds the corporation changing the game's rules on him.  First, the Executive class eliminates penalties for rough play.  Then it eliminate replacements/substitutions, so that no injured players can leave the game in progress.  Then, finally, the corporate men push a game with no established time limit.  The final Rollerball game ends only when the last man is standing...

As you might expect, the Rollerball tournaments serve, in many ways, as the highlights of this classic sci-fi film.  Staged with meticulous attention-to-detail and with an eye towards speed and acceleration, these games grow increasingly violent throughout the film.  The set-piece against the Tokyo team, in particular, descends into a blood bath.  One player even catches fire before the game is done.

If possible, the film's climactic contest -- New York vs. Jonathan E.'s Houston team -- is even more vicious.  Scarlet blood is seen spilled all over the game arena, and in one horrible moment, the first aid responders are actually run down by a speeding motorcycle.  Then our protagonist, Jonathan, kills a player right in front of Houseman's character, and before a live TV audience.  

All the while, a packed house cheers and applauds wildly over the violent action... 

"Jonathan, there's one thing you ought to know, and nobody's said it, but I'm sure of it. They're afraid of you, Jonathan. All the way to the top, they are."

On one level, of course, Rollerball satirizes the hyper-kinetic, overtly-commercialized world of modern  organized sports, where the strongest, hunkiest lunkhead (Tim Tebow?) receives the most admiration based on the size of his... muscle mass.  

This notion of making athletes "heroes" is made clear in a Rollerball scene set inside a locker room, as Bartholomew speaks to the players' egos.  "They dream they're great rollerballers," he tells them, speaking of Executives.   "They dream they're Jonathan; they have muscles, they bash in faces."

 

On the other hand, and on a much deeper thematic level, Rollerball muses directly on the topic of freedom in a technological, mass-media Adams) makes a points relative to life in the 1970s and today.  Ella asks Jonathan why he simply doesn't do what the Executives want him to do especially since he would be paid handsomely for his compliance. 

Jonathan notes that it is a choice "between having nice things...or freedom."  Ella responds -- terrifyingly -- "But comfort is freedom."  

By contrast, Jonathan suggests the truth: "That's never been it. I mean, them privileges just buy us off."

In other words: Don't sweat things like individual freedom or liberty.  There are items to purchase, things to own.  Don't you want an Italian villa?

Incidentally, this very-Rollerball sentiment was mirrored rather dramatically in President Jimmy Carter's famous and much-derided "Crisis of Confidence" speech five years later, in 1979.  He said:

"In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we've discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We've learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose."

Rollerball depicts a society in which the people have indeed accepted control by a ruling elite...in return for being "provided for," in return for "privilege." 

But, in accordance with the President Carter quote, these same people have no sense of meaning or purpose. 

Part of the reason the people live with such an unjust arrangement is because of a deliberate black-out of educational materials and information.  Rollerball tournaments play endlessly on the television, and local libraries are impersonal computer centers that feature only "summaries" of important literary works and ideas. 

Instead, the corporations own history itself: "What do you want books for?," Jonathan's team-mate, Moon Pie asks innocently.  "Look Johnny, if you wanna learn somethin', just get a Corporate Teacher to come and teach it to ya'. Use yer Privilege Card..."

It's clearly an Internet-less world, and in one scene in the film, Jonathan E. goes to Geneva to visit a computerized archive where all the answers about "corporate rule" are purported to exist.  Not surprisingly, the computer librarian, named Zero, proves absolutely unhelpful. in providing such data.  In fact, the machine has lost the totality of the "13th Century" in terms of knowledge.  Thus, there is no place to turn to in this world to learn about history, science, or nature.  Everything is the game.  Everything is blood lust. 

Because as long as you think about the game, and which team is winning or losing, you aren't thinking about who is gaming the system and for what agenda.

Based on William Harrison's short story, "The Roller Ball Murder" (1973; Esquire), Rollerball runs for over two hours, and it features essentially two modes. The first mode reveals the kind of listless, purposeless, meaningless existence of "comfortable" citizens like Jonathan E.  The second mode involves the game matches themselves, set on a circular track.  The game play is urgent, pointed and murderous, a deliberate contrast to the film's lackadaisacal first mode.  I imagine that some audiences today would probably find these aspects of the film boring, but as the first mode concerns the existential angst of a futuristic gladiator, the insight into his daily life and routine is entirely appropriate. 

Uniquely, Rollerball also makes widespread use of classical music, including Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor, and Adagio in G minor from Tomaso Albinoni.  These musical selections comment on the action  (and understand the action) in a way that the film's knowledge-challenged dramatis personae cannot.  The music -- so distinctly of the human past -- connects Jonathan E's futuristic struggle for freedom to such struggles in man's long history, and arises specifically from the Baroque tradition, dealing intentionally with the "affect of man."  The musical selection that opens the film, Toccata and Fugue, renders the accompanying imagery (of game preparations in the vast Rollerball stadium) almost religious in stature and transmits the idea that we are witnessing an important ritual being played out.

Rollerball's production design is, accordingly, relatively impersonal and dehumanizing in nature.  Citizens visit vast "luxury centers," mall-like locations -- places to shop -- in keeping with such kindred fare as Logan's Run (1976).  The Executive Suites as seen in the film are palatial and extravagant.  The opulent life-style of the executive class is revealed in one dinner party scene, and the sequence ends with the drunken, entitled elite mindlessly blowing up trees with futuristic guns.

The Rollerball arena is itself an important metaphor in the film.  The track is a loop, a track that never ends, with no end and no beginning.   Teams battle one another for supremacy, going around and around on this track endlessly (kind of like a NASCAR race, I suppose).  But one individual -- a Spartacus of the future age -- breaks out of this circular trajectory and takes the fight right to the stands. 

One spectacularly effective  composition in the Jewison film finds Jonathan E. braced against a transparent wall on the Rollerball rink. Behind him is Bartholomew, the executive, scowling.  And reflected on the transparent glass are out-of-control flames 

Here we have all three critical elements: the gladiator, the villain who is "untouchable" and the fire of revolt -- of individual achievement -- threatening to burn out of control.

The enduring genius of Rollerball, I would submit, is that it artfully exposes how powerful people become addicted to controlling the lives of others  The corporate stooges of the Executive Class wage full-bore, murderous war against a citizen because they want one player -- one damned player -- to retire from "their" game.  They apparently don't consider tolerating Jonathan E's presence for a few more years, followed, presumably, by a peaceful retirement.  Instead they seek to dominate and defeat Jonathan E. -- a champion and competitor -- and in doing so, incite his sense of competition. 

For Jonathan, "Four or five little things make one big thing," and the retirement demand, on top of the loss of his wife to an executive, constitutes a tipping point.  By pushing the stubborn and tough Jonathan E. to his line in the sand, the Corporate Culture only assures that Jonathan E. proves the very point they don't want established:

The will of the individual matters.



Movie Trailer: Rollerball (1975)

Sci-Fi Wisdom of the Week

"It's name is Quetzalcoatl.   Just call it Q, that's all you'll have time to say before it tears you apart!"

- Q: The Winged Serpent (1982), to be reviewed tomorrow.

Memory Bank: Daredevils Magazine

As you probably realize from the nature of this blog, I have an obsession with ephemera, for that printed and/or written material that doesn't always last from generation to generation.  In my new Memory Bank posts, I'll be looking at some genre ephemera of the 1970s and 1980s.

To start us off today, I want to introduce (or re-introduce...) you to Daredevils Magazine,a publication that covered "Adventure Films and Television."  Daredevils was a magazine of NMP (New Media Publishing) that ran for approximately two years, I think. 

The cover price per issue was $2.95, and the editors were Hal Schuster and Cynthia Broadwater.  Contributing editors were James Van Hise and John Peel, two names you may recognize from the day.

Every issue of Daredevils featured "news bits" about upcoming TV and movie ventures, as well as reader mail, called "Daring Comments."  The focus of Daredevils was just what you would think from the colorful name: adventure and fantasy in all its forms, from James Bond to Tarzan to the film canon of Clint Eastwood.  Daredevils had a nice niche, I always thought, being not purely sci-fi oriented (like the more well-known Starlog) or horror oriented (like Fangoria or Gorezone). 

In a relatively short publishing life, Daredevils reviewed the James Bond films, gazed at new 1980s film iniatives such as Streets of Fire, Greystoke, The Road Warrior, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Conan, The Never Ending Story, Red Dawn, Little Drummer Girl, and Starman.  The magazine also looked back at Rawhide and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and featured excellent retrospectives on Humphrey Bogart, Johnny Weismuller, and Richard Burton.  

Occasionally, the magazine featured interviews with the likes of writer John Gardner or producer Sydney Newman, and convention reports ("Spycon.")  About the only thing that seemed pro-forma about Daredevils was an on-going Star Trek episode guide, which had been featured in many other magazines, ad infinitum. Another writer for Daredevils was Terry S. Bowers, who is revered in Space: 1999 fan circles, and in issue #9 (July 1984), she submitted a great piece on the Mission: Impossible TV series. 

I first encountered Daredevils when I was sixteen, around summer of 1986, I believe.  I had my first summer jobs (working first the early shift at McDonalds and then at a Swedish company called Avesta Stainless as a temp).  Anyway, I kept obsessively saving all my money from week-to-week.  My parents encouraged me to spend a little dough, so I spent time at a fantastic used bookstore in Montclair, New Jersey (next to a gaming shop called The Compleat Strategist).  The store carried just about the whole collection of Daredevils issues, and marked them down to $1.50 a piece. 

In a matter of weeks that summer, I purchased and devoured them all.  I've always loved reading about film and television, and Daredevils really stoked my interest in action films.  At that time, I knew very little about Humphrey Bogart or the older Tarzan films, so the magazine did a nice job of balancing coverage of the new and tantalizing (like Indiana Jones), with more classic material.

I've kept my collection of Daredevils for something like a quarter-century now.  I still use them for research occasionally, and still enjoy leafing through the pages and remembering my teenage years and the "adventure" cinema of the 1980s.

Below is a sampling of Daredevils covers.

Collectible of the Week: Universal City Studio's Mini Monster Play Case (Remco; 1980)

In 1980, Remco released a whole line of toys based on the classic Universal Monsters.  The line included figures of Bela Lugosi's Dracula, Karloff's Frankenstein Monster, the Wolfman, the Phantom of the Opera, the Creature from the Black Lagoon, and the Karloff Mummy. 

Best of all, these small action figures were given a perfect home with this unique "Mini Monster Play case," a fold-up play-set that is a "monster mansion and portable storage case for all the mini movie monsters!"

This laminated play set with "glow in the dark features" came complete with a "flip-top mummy's tomb," a "carrying handle," a "creature cage," a "disappearing lab table with instrument panel," and a "spooky laboratory set with doorway." 

Unfortunately my old, battered Remco Play Case is missing Frankenstein's lab table, and I don't have any of the figures anymore, save for a very battered Count Dracula. 

Boy, do I wish I had kept track of those mini-monsters better back in 1980... 

By today's standards, this probably isn't the world's greatest or more accurate toy.  The scale of the "painted" laboratory on the rear wall is way off when compared to the actual action figures.  But still, I have such a love for these Universal Monsters that I find the Mini-Monster Play Case from Remco a jewel in my home office collection. 

I should add, these Mini-Monsters from Remco remain so popular that customized new monsters are today being created and sold on E-Bay.  These "new" monsters include Jack the Ripper, The Invisible Man, Dr. Frankenstein, and Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde.

One of these days, when I have the cash to blow, I'm definitely going to buy a Remco Mummy and get him home in his tomb...

Cloned from a Mutual Zygote # 8: Predator vs. BTVS Moloch

The Horror Lexicon #2: The Car Won't Start (or Runs Out of Gas)



Why won't it start? From Silent Hill (2006)

This week in reviewing the horror film lexicon -- the common visual/thematic language of the genre --we gaze at another trope that frequently appears in scary cinema.  In "The Car Won't Start (or Runs out of Gas)" composition the only means of escape -- an automobile -- proves a possibly fatal disappointment to the protagonist, usually a final girl on the run.  Like that hero, we are stranded in battle, with an enemy nearby.  We are vulnerable.

Amy Steel cranks it, to no avail, in Friday the 13th Part 2 (1981).

The Car Won't Start trope usually consists of a series of tight compositions in the following sequence: a close-up of the desperate protagonist getting into the car and drivers' seat, and then insert shots of a key twisting in the ignition, and perhaps wheels grinding uselessly in the mud, or dirt. 

This sequence of shots often repeats itself two or three times in quick succession in order to fully express the futile nature of the enterprise.  Sometimes, the Car Won't Start trope also ends in success...at the very last moment (The Fog [1980]).  The car suddenly starts, and the protagonist zooms away from danger (only, usually, to find another obstacle somewhere close by, ahead...). 

The Car Won't Start trope -- a tightly-edited, tense montage of short moments -- is designed to express the significant idea that technology is undependable in the face of a crisis.  We take for granted the idea that our cars will start up on command, and that we can travel wherever we want.  We're a mobile people, and we live by this very belief.  It's at the heart of our economic survival, and even connection our to our communities and food supplies.  In horror cinema, however, technology is undependable and twitchy, prolonging the state of suspense/terror.  Sometimes the villain has sabotaged the car.  Sometimes the environment -- mud, again -- mitigates the advantage technology provides. 

Ash turns the ignition over and over, in The Evil Dead (1983)

Many Car Won't Start moments are featured in the 1980s slasher milieu and that is so because slashers are almost supernatural predators who appear to operate above our laws of nature and beyond the reach of our cultural infrastructure. 

Jason in the Friday the 13th films, for instance, is frequently associated with nature, with thunder storms and lightning.  His presence often coincides with power shorting out, and if the car won't start, it's a good guess that he is nearby, ready with the machete.

In the horror films of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s there are well over 75 examples of moments wherein technology fails, and our preferred mode of transportation fails or stalls.  



The wheels are spinning. From Jeepers Creepers (2001).

Some of the prominent horror films that feature this familiar and common visual language and situation are:

The Hearse (1980), Mother's Day (1980), Dead and Buried (1981), Friday the 13th Part II (1981), Halloween II (1981), The Howling (1981), Friday the 13th Part 3 in 3-D (1982), Hell Night (1982), Madman (1982), Cujo (1983), The Evil Dead (1983), Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (1984), Silver Bullet (1985), The Hitcher (1986), Poltergeist II: The Other Side (1986), Creepshow 2 (1987), Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn (1987), Leatherface (199), Night of the Living Dead (1990), Leprechaun (1992), Sleepwalkers (1992), Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday (1993), Urban Legend (1996), Phantoms (1998), Jeepers Creepers (2001) and Silent Hill (2006)

CULT MOVIE REVIEW: In Time (2011)

"Why do you think there are time zones? Why do you think taxes and prices go up the same day in the ghetto? The cost of living keeps rising to make sure people keep dying. How else could there be men with a million years while most live day-to-day? But the truth is... there's more than enough. No one has to die before their time."

- Henry Hamilton (Matthew Bomer) reveals the truth In Time (2011).

Writer/director Andrew Niccol gave the modern science fiction cinema one of its finest and most heartfelt dystopian films in 1997's Gattaca.  By envisioning a world wherein genetics determined destiny and wealth, Niccol offered a unique social critique, one primarily concerning racism and class society.  

Niccol's latest sci-fi vision, In Time (2011) shares some of Gattaca's ambitious qualities, but it stresses action and high-concept sci-fi rather than moving character development.  Where Gattaca was endlessly inspiring, In Time (2011) is fast-moving. Where Gattaca was a deep character piece, exquisitely performed by Ethan Hawke and Jude Law, In Time plays more like a sci-fi variation on Bonnie & Clyde (1967). 

Specifically, the famous line "we rob banks" from that Arthur Penn classic appears to be the impetus for In Time's second half, in which two rebels "steal time" from the rich and give it to the poor.

In Time's saving grace, however, is the central premise, a sci-fi "high concept," which is so blazingly of the moment, and so incredibly relevant to the national discourse, that it imbues the film with zeal, energy and purpose. 

Specifically, In Time is set in a hypothetical future wherein people only live to be twenty-five, and then must constantly "buy" more time to stay alive.  If they don't get the needed time, they "time out" (die).  If they do, they could, with a little luck, live to old age.  Or at least until tomorrow...

In short, the film literalizes the adage "time is money," as the quest to procure more time (centuries, years, months, days, hour, minutes, seconds...) becomes the driving economic force in this future America.  The film focuses on one rebel, Will Salas (Justin Timberlake), as he begins to recognize, after a personal tragedy involving his mother, how flawed the system is, and how terrible life has become.

Unfortunately, the economic system of In Time is actually a stacked deck, Will soon learns.  

The corporate-controlled future envisioned by In Time thrives explicitly on "Darwinian capitalism," which sounds a lot like Mitt Romney's business ethos of "creative destruction."  

In the world of In Time, the rich, who own most of the  economy's  wealth  live by the motto:

"For a few to be immortal, many must die."   

To become richer and live longer, the wealthy must constantly squeeze the poor in a vise.  No middle class survives, or is depicted in the film.  It's long gone, I assume.

Every day in In Time's world, the rich manipulate the cost of living in the cordoned off "zones," ensuring that average people must work harder and faster to earn the same amount of time.  Every day, the price of food, gas, and other necessities rises so that the poor can't pause to  think about the inherent unfairness of the system or even travel to a better place, if there is one.  Instead, they must worry about the time clocks on their arms as simple survival becomes the most critical task each day.

Preserving this system are Time Keepers, law enforcement officials who report to the rich, and who make certain that even if a poor person hits the jackpot in terms of extra time, he or she doesn't get to keep that wealth.  Rather, riches in this world are safely and perpetually ensconced in the hands of the few and powerful.  One corporate executive who runs a time bank, Weis (Vincent Kartheiser), has a million years of life stashed in his vault for a rainy day.  He doesn't use it.  He doesn't touch it.  He just keeps it.  It trickles not down, but nowhere.

Meanwhile, average folk die young every day, unable to make more time for themselves.

It's pretty clear how In Time plays into the Zeitgeist of right now.  Americans are becoming aware that our own economic system -- which once encouraged hard work -- has gone wrong.  A cabal of "vulture capitalists" (a term coined by conservative Rick Perry) control the resources while the masses suffer foreclosure, economic hardship, and lose the social safety net that was erected over a century of hard work to protect them from just such robber-baronism.   There's no doubt that the Occupy Wall Street movement is part of this film's sub-text, and increasingly becoming the sub-text of many high-profile entertainments, finally replacing the tired if ubiquitous "post-9/11" Hollywood paradigm. 

It's also rather amazing how much In Time parallels the narrative and context of Bonnie & Clyde.  That landmark film also involved robbers who were bucking an unfair economic system.  There, banks after the Great Depression were foreclosing on family farms left and right, and leaving Americans with absolutely nothing.  Bonnie & Clyde didn't rob from the people, though.  Instead, they took from  the banks on the theory that you can't steal what's already, in effect, been stolen.  In Time adopts that very formulation, terrorizing an establishment that has used its power to unfairly take from others.

But In Time goes further than Bonnie &  Clyde ever did in one sense.  It actively suggests widespread revolt.  Very soon in In Time, a revolutionary thought dawns on the wrongfully exploited folks.  The truth is, one character admits, that there is more than enough time (wealth) to go around for everybody.  Nobody needs to die before their time.

Therefore, it's time (wealth) re-distribution time.  And that's the (communist? socialist? just?) task the film's outlaws, Will  and Sylvia Weis (Amanda Seyfried) undertake...with guns a-blazing.  They aren't making time for themselves...they're giving it away (and again, like Bonnie and Clyde), becoming folk heroes in the process.

In real life, the 1% should probably be concerned about this eventuality at least a little because many people, in both political parties, are waking up to the inherent unfairness of the game too, and In Time certainly brings these submerged thoughts to the surface. 

How Super-Pacs buy our candidates. 

How corporate crimes go unpunished.

How wealth doesn't trickle down, but gets sucked upward (like cocaine in the nostrils...) in terms of outrageous executive bonuses and salaries, sometimes hundreds of times higher than those of employees who actually, you know, do the work of a business and produce the goods. 

Aside from Bonnie & Clyde, I was also reminded very much of Fritz Lang's landmark sci-fi epic Metropolis (1927) while screening In Time. 

That silent film also showcased a revolution among the have-nots against the haves.  There, however, the film advocated a peaceable "mediator" between the hands of society (the workers) and the so-called brains of society (the bosses).  That mediator, importantly, was the human heart. 

And heart is what is absolutely is missing from the creative destructors of today's out-of-whack Darwinian capitalism.  They don't want us to have access to health care. They don't want us to keep pensions.  They don't want us to organize, so we can effectively defend ourselves against corporate greed.  They don't want any regulations to prevent them from making obscene amounts of money, at the expense of the environment and our health.  Why, they don't even want us to have contraception so we can manage the size and shape of our own households (and therefore our economic future).  In short, they want us to be nothing but life-long debt slaves, so we can continue to make them money that they will then keep locked in their vaults, out of circulation, except for their needs.  This is the dynamic In Time contends with: a world where there is no compassion -- no heart -- and where obscene wealth is the highest aspiration in life.

Given America today, In Time plays brilliantly and brashly into the populist spirit of 2012, and the film's central metaphor -- time is money -- works so well because it exposes something trenchant about our human existence.  In the film, when you don't get currency (again, time), you die right on the spot.  This fact is clouded in real life, because we don't literally have a constant balance on our arm ticking down to zero. 

Instead, we get niggled with a hundred different debits a day, and don't see the forest for the trees. 

If we can't afford health care, we will die. 

If we can't get a job and provide for our family, we will die. 

If we can't buy food, we will die. 

In Time cuts out the middle man, as it were, and bluntly proposes the notion that by absorbing resources from all of us, the super rich are actually killing us, a little bit at a time.  Certainly, they're killing the middle class.   If this is class warfare, so be it.  We aren't the ones who started it. 

However, as much as I find the central metaphor of In Time meaningful and brilliantly executed, I must confess, I don't think the film works as well as Gattaca did. 

Both films depict an unfair system, and ways to get it around it, but Gattaca really made us feel for Hawke's character and his plight.  Justin Timberlake is fine in In Time.  He's not a bad actor, judging by his work here and in The Social Network.  But he is not yet able to convey the depth of his grief, sadness, anger and fear very well. At least not so well as Hawke did.  There's something more superficial about Timberlake's character here -- something more conventional -- and so In Time works more fully as a great concept than as an affecting human drama.  

Bonnie & Clyde featured action and yet it was also a character piece.  The characters here just don't compare in terms of complexity and humanity.  At times, they feel like props instead of real personalities.

Also, by focusing so strongly on action, In Time tries to ramp up suspense with cliffhanger-type scenarios wherein people are running out of time...to the last second, and need more time NOW, or will die instantaneously.  These moments are played right to the edge of sanity, and ultimately feel kind of absurd and cheap.   When you've devised such a great and timely science fiction metaphor, it seems a waste of time, if you will, to focus on car chases, shoot-outs and on-foot pursuits.

The film also doesn't really effectively get at another interesting point.  And that is that everyone in the film stops aging at twenty-five.  In short, this means your grand mom is hot.  This means your son looks like your brother.  It's a complete, absolute unwriting of all the social cues that arise from the aging process.  You could go to bed with a hot 95 year old, or a 105 year old, and not know it.   In Time doesn't really explore the issue of what this all means: the breaking down of traditional human social organization. 

If the world of Niccol's vision has a time problem, it also has another.  What is lost when people don't visibly reach middle age, or old age?  I would have liked it if In Time dealt with this idea more convincingly, or even satirically (perhaps equating the youth-centric culture to the wealthy's consuming obsession with plastic surgery.) 

The film's ending also feels wrong to me on a gut level, because the corrupt system is overturned with relative ease, with only the hard push of two armed (if admittedly well-placed) rebels.  I'm happy the corrupt system is overturned, but I don't believe it could be so easily destroyed.  Change isn't about a person, it's about a long, difficult process, right? 

Dystopian films made in the 1960s and 1970s didn't feel compelled to universally provide happy endings (THX-1138, Z.P.G., etc.), yet today, it seems the happy crappy Hollywood ending is pro forma.  Gattaca ended on an upbeat note, but at least the system was not overturned.  Recent dystopic movies such as Gamer, Surrogate and now In Time reveal "heroes" beating authoritarian regimes with just a few rebellious moves.   Frankly, I don't believe it would be so easy. 

In Time is brimming with great, timely ideas and loads of intelligence, but I feel that overall the film should have been bleaker and perhaps even angrier.  The Bonnie & Clyde model was there to follow, and it should have been pursued more aggressively, perhaps, in the final act. Weis should have put the fix in for his wayward daughter, Sylvia, and for Will, and gunned down the heroes in a blaze of glory.  That feels "truer" to me.

In Time certainly doesn't waste your "time," but I'm not certain it actually makes the most of its time, either.

Movie Trailer: In Time (2011)

Theme Song of the Week: Freddy's Nightmares (1988 - 1990)