< In Time

In Time/YMMV


  • Acceptable Targets: Rich people. Doesn't matter how you made your money, Will doesn't seem to care. In his mind, if you're rich, you must have stolen it. Of course, he probably came to this conclusion because he personally witnessed the death that made him rich...
    • Considering the premise is that the system is created so that the rich get to live forever, while the poor die before their natural time, anyone rich IS part of a system which causes thousands to die prematurely on a daily basis. So anyone rich has ultimately stolen it from others (who've had all the extra years over 25 that they'd naturally have lived, "stolen" from them from birth).
      • It hits really hard when Weis's personal vault is opened, showing that cartridge with a million years on it - ergo, to "earn" that cartridge, he had to have effectively killed one million people.
      • Weis is a monster who is basically a loan shark to people who will die if they don't get the time, sure, but what about ... I don't know, some novelist or something, who got his or her time fair and square because other rich people paid to read it and he or she got a royalty check? (How would that even work? The person gets a capsule in the mail maybe?) Then again, there doesn't seem to be much of art in this future, so maybe that's not an issue, but, if this is anything like our world, there are rich people who, somehow, someway, got rich off of other rich people (and possibly even started out poor) who were, in no way part of the system that oppresses the poor, probably due to rich people buying crap they don't need and someone else having the ingenuity to realize that rich people would buy crap they don't need. I guess you could say they're jerks for not sharing with the poor - but someone is giving the guy who runs the timeline time to share with the less fortunate. Of course, it's kind of understandable they didn't get into this in the movie - In Time is already packed with so many ideas that are barely explored you could make ten more movies.
  • Anvilicious: This film is not at all subtle with its messages about class warfare.
    • The only way it could get more blatant about its overall message is if the entire runtime was just the actors screaming "CAPITALISM IS EVIL! KILL THE CAPITALIST PIGS!" over and over again.
  • Artistic License Economics: Perhaps deliberately invoked. If the system operated on any kind of supply/demand process, then it would require a constant stream of new births to prevent deflation. If it was meant to prevent overpopulation, the cost of living would be based on population concentration. Instead wages are decreased and prices are increased by fiat(especially once Will and Sylvia begin their time theft spree), meaning the purpose of the system is to Work The Poor To Death at a controllable rate.
  • Artistic License: Biology: The system meant to prevent overpopulation would actually cause it to happen faster. The worse off people are, the more kids they have, sooner. Even with the most conservative estimates, population would double every twenty years. "Population control" is propaganda to justify systemic slavery.
    • Maybe. To get the 1 year off a new baby, you have to take care of it for at least some of the 25 years before it's clock starts ticking.
      • The extra hour is irrelevant. Lots of kids in tough times is an instinctual survival strategy. Poor nations everywhere overshoot the replacement rate while the rich ones routinely undershoot. If the system was made for sustainability it would be geared toward financially security, not day-to-day survival. But if it was geared to produce hordes of people willing to work more and more for less and less...
      • On top of which, remember that a person can actually work before turning twenty-five. In a place like Dayton, where law enforcement only comes at all if they suspect someone there is stealing time from someone from a wealthier district, child-labor laws are going to be pretty meaningless. So what you'd get would be couples having many children and putting them to work at the youngest age possible, so as to get them bringing time into the household. They would also try to get their daughters married off at the youngest practicable age, so that they could start having children of their own before their clocks start ticking. So what you'd get would be a society with a birthrate like that of a pre-modern agrarian society, which is to say very high.
      • Hey! You have three minutes left on your clock! I'll take those diamond earrings for a day each. Or you could come back tomorrow... (sucker...)
    • On a different but related subject (to the trope, not the above discussion) aging is not caused by an "aging gene", but rather through damage sustained to DNA due to repeated splitting and copying necessary for cellular division.
  • Believing Their Own Lies: Raymond Leon honestly thinks the system is necessary to maintain the population and that charity actually harms the poor.
    • Except he never gets to explain his point in the movie. For all we know, he actually does have a good argument - they just never bothered to let us see it.
  • Complete Monster: Fortis and his gang. They regularly steal from the poor, bleeding out their time till the person just falls dead.
  • Dull Surprise: Not "Dull" as such but angry because Justin rarely shows any emotion besides moody and grumpy (And occasionally pissed off to mix it up).
  • Fetish Fuel: There were undoubtedly folk who looked at the mother-wife-daughter all-look-25 and thought "sign me up!"
  • Narm: Justin Timberlake's sobbing, for some.
    • Also, note to directors: If your movie is going to feature dramatic scenes of running people, you should probably make sure the actors have an at least mildly graceful run or reconsider the shots you use.
  • Nightmare Fuel/Paranoia Fuel: The fact that a person's life expectancy is used for currency.
  • Strangled by the Red String: Sylvia has been watching Will from a distance for a few days. A few hours after meeting him in person, Sylvia decides to go skinny-dipping with Will, a complete stranger at that point.
  • Straw Man Has a Point: Salas gives Borel, his friend of ten years, a decade before he runs off to take his mother to New Greenwich, but he doesn't run out and get necessities for his wife and baby, he goes off to a bar and drinks himself to death. Some poor people really don't know how to handle money.
    • His wife isn't much better - She looks at her infant child's clock and wistfully states that it's a whole year they can't make use of for twenty-five years. She had the kid just so it could pay off her debts.
      • This happens to Will too by his mother and her debts.
      • Another guy buys a gun to stop the Minute Men from collecting a debt. It works, but he gets cocky enough to strut casually and this gets the gangsters so mad, they just turn around and shoot him in the back. He's a Doomed Moral Victor, though - you can't steal time off a dead man's clock, so buying the gun denied the gangsters their prize.
  • Tear Jerker: Will failing to save his mom.
  • Too Dumb to Live: Considering stealing a life is as easy as shaking someone's arm, you'd think the people would invest in more wristguards.
    • Unless wristguards don't work because the system was designed with life-thieves like the Minute Men in mind. The rich want thugs like Fortis draining time from the ghettos.
  • Unfortunate Implications: The main villain of the film is an evil financier with the very Jewish surname of Weis. He is actually called a "usurer" in the film. This alludes pretty clearly to some classic antisemitic tropes.
    • Which is only strengthened by the overall message of the movie, as anti-Semitism is prevalent in most strains of socialist and communist ideology, and the film is one long rage against capitalism.
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