Yesterday, H— drove the_child and I to the cinema where we watched In Time [ imdb ]. I quite enjoyed it, though the story doesn't hold up well to critical attention. Watch this movie with your sense of metaphor dialed up to 11 and your sense of worldbuilding dismounted and sent out for tuning.

In a sense, it was the bastard child of Logan's Run and Gattaca. In another sense, it's a filmic adaption of Harlan Ellison's "'Repent, Harlequin!' Said the Ticktockman". The production design is elegant and slick and really serves the story well. (I want one of every damned car in that movie, too.) If you just surf along with the action and don't think too hard about the underlying logic of either the world or the plot, it's pretty entertaining.

Of course, in the car on the way home, the_child was all over the inconsistencies in the worldbuilding, the "how it works" questions, the various plot holes. We talked about it all for a while, what the movie meant to us and to the characters. That the movie did take questions of privilege and mortality head on (at least up to a point) is very much in its favor, though there were odd echoes to my current cancer woes.

As a special bonus, there was a display in the lobby of the theatre for which @plunderpuss must have been the model:



The movie is Arthur Christmas [ imdb ], should you be wanting more info about @plunderpuss's career as an animated character.