In Time (Niccol, 2011) is streaming on Disney+, Prime Video and Netflix
Seeing Justin Timberlake as a grieving real estate agent in Reptile on Netflix last week, I was reminded of some of his other forays on to the ‘big’ screen.
Andrew Niccol’s In Time came out twelve or so years ago and it’s sitting in the dark recesses of Disney+ (also Prime Video and Netflix) waiting for someone to find it again:
Expat Kiwi auteur Andrew Niccol (Gattaca) somehow always manages to tap in to the zeitgeist and with new sci-fi thriller In Time his own timing is almost spookily perfect. A parable about the modern political economy, In Time isn’t a particularly sophisticated analysis but while protestors occupy Wall Street, St Paul’s in London and the City to Sea Bridge here in Wellington, it seems almost perfectly calculated to provoke a big Fuck You! to the bankers, speculators and hoarders who are rapidly becoming the Hollywood villains we love to hate.
In Niccol’s world, several decades into the future, time is literally money: human beings have been genetically modified to stop (physically) ageing at 25. Which would be lovely apart from the fact that a clock on your wrist then starts counting down the one year you have left to live and the time on your wrist becomes currency. You can earn more by working, transfer it to others by shaking hands, borrow more from banks and loan sharks or you can spend it on booze to blot out the horror of your pathetic little life.
Justin Timberlake has been getting by in the ghetto for three of his 25+ but when a mysterious man gives him 100 years before suiciding off a bridge (and his mother dies because the bus fares have gone up) he is fired up to investigate and then correct this obvious injustice. The super-rich are hoarding time for themselves and becoming immortal and the 99% are slowly dying off because of artificial shortages created by those who own the means of production.
I wasn’t that taken with it at the time – at least not as much as Refn’s Drive which came out in the same week – but it has stuck in the memory as a rare example of thoughtful original sci-fi. And that political message is perhaps even more relevant today.
Editor’s note
I’ve just counted that there have been 68 newsletters posted since the relaunch back in July which means that the archives might start to be useful – especially to recent subscribers.
Numbers have been roughly doubling every month which is very pleasing.
To help guide you through all that content, I have tagged each post with the streaming service that a title appears on and the homepage now features samples and links to complete entries for all those services. Each one also gets a page of its own. For example, here’s the AroVision one.
The next challenge is to do the same for non-Kiwi streamers so that our Aussie and UK friends get the same level of service. Let me get right on that.
And, of course, I can’t guarantee that titles will remain on specific services forever. Alert me to any errors you find and I’ll fix them.
Something you may notice going back through the archives is that anything older than a month is behind the paywall. This is the Substack default behaviour but, as it happens, also suits me.
All the original Funerals & Snakes content remains free of charge.
