In Time

It is the year 2026 and the global currency is not longer dollars or euros or pounds or dinars or rupees. It is time. In seconds, minutes, hours, days, months and years. So if you want to travel by bus for a journey that takes 2 hours to walk, then you need to pay 2 hours as the fare for your ticket. Interesting right? You are born with a time frame of 25 years in your bank. Beyond 25 you don’t age a day. But you start eating away into the 1 hour that is provided for you in your account. For anything more, you need to work. And work really hard. Needless to say, you are paid in time. All of this is recorded in a chip that is built into your left arm which starts counting down from the instance that you complete 25 years of age. It is as if a bolt of energy passes through you and your clock suddenly starts counting down from 1 year.


In all of this, there are the good guys and the bad guys. The good guys are of course poor and stay in Zone 12 and have to work their way upwards to the Greenwich Zone or something like that. Those are the rich guys and ergo the bad guys. Sounds familiar right? Same old story really. Just that the currency has been changed to time and the standard policeman has been replaced by a time keeper. No points for really guessing the story and how it will finish in about 15 minutes into the movie. So I am not really going to waste my time or your time in describing the rest of the story.

Directed by Andrew Niccol (Gattaca / Lord of War), In Time is probably a serious waste of precious time – as ironic as it may seem. It lacks anything innovative despite a track record that Niccol has of giving us reasonably interesting movies. He does give us some interesting chase sequences but nothing which is brilliant and makes you want to sit upright in your seat. Just the same old boring stuff.

He doesn’t have much of support from the cast either. Never been a Justin Timberlake fan. Guess he is a director’s actor only. Been a fan of Amanda Seyfried but she surprisingly fails miserably in this one. I wonder if this years Razzies had these 2 performances which are outstandingly bad very honestly. The support cast including the otherwise decent Cillian Murphy is significantly below par.

Overall quite a disaster of a movie which would explain why it didn’t do too well across the board. I for one managed to sit through it. But couldn’t find anything great. Therefore 4 on 10. One doesn’t need to push for an opportunity to watch it – seriously.

Watch the trailer at http://www.imdb.com/video/imdb/vi775265305/

I Am Number Four

This is one of the movies that missed out earlier this year. One of the 8 or 9 movie release weekends which I simply could not get my arms around all through 2011. Hope 2012 is not as packed. On hindsight which coincidentally everyone is @ 20/20 levels, I don’t quite regret having missed I Am Number Four on the big screen. I picked up the book a couple of weeks back and finished reading it last afternoon. Picked the DVD over the weekend because I wanted to watch it immediately after finishing the book yesterday. The book by Pittacus Lore (I am sure that’s an anagram for something. Need to research it) is a fantasy which is not the best written super hero / fantasy piece ever. But to its credit, it is well paced, doesn’t take too much time to build up and is never short of excitement. Quite entertaining in short. And therefore, I was hoping that the movie will turn out to be a reasonably entertaining flick. Not to be.

We are talking about a planet called Lorien which has been destroyed by another civilization called The Mogadarians – Mogs for short. The Mogs have a simple funda – they pick a planet and drain it off all the resources. Once done, they move to the next planet. This planet hopping gets them to Lorien and the ensuing war results in the latter getting obliterated. However, 9 children have been saved along with their guardians and some animals – something like Noah’s Ark – and sent to…no points for guessing – EARTH (as if there was a paucity of planets). And thankfully they are spread across various locations on the planet. They are in hiding so that they can grow into strong Loriens one day and claims their planet back. The Mogs, however, have other plans. They are chasing the Loriens down to ensure no one is left over. The thing is that they cannot kill them at random. Thanks to a Loric spell, they have to kill them in a serial order. 3 have been killed to date over the past 6 years. Our hero is Number 4.

I have nothing against fantasia. In fact, you will notice through my writings that I love it. What cheeses me off is a weak attempt to get a super hero movie to life. There has been absolutely no emphasis on the background story from Lorien. The story has been changed in the second half. The Mogs have been reduced to a bunch of ugly looking gangsters who have gills to breath. The Mog soldier with his flashy, colourful, magical sword doesn’t exist in the movie. There is no emphasis whatsoever on #4s training. Add to that, performances which were barely average. Direction was barely OK.

What is that old saying – Never judge a movie by its book? 2 movies over the weekend which were based on works of fiction. One Day – I haven’t read but I am eagerly looking forward to getting my hands on because the story was quite good. IANF – wasted investment in both book and movie I guess. And yes – a sequel is in the offing – smart thinking but remains to be seen how it is executed. Thank God the DVD was priced @ a 40% discount. 4 on10 for the movie.

Watch the trailer at http://www.imdb.com/video/imdb/vi2997656345/