Movie Review: In Time

I don’t expect you to fully understand the motivations behind my feelings towards this movie. As a robot I am ruled by a device known as a logic circuit. This mechanism demands that I respect logic and integrate it into my activities, decisions and opinions whenever it is possible. Note that I didn’t say whenever it was “humanly” possible. There is no logic circuit for the human race.

It is for this reason that I could not enjoy this film called “In Time”. As you may well know it is based on a premise that at some point in the future methods are developed to install immortality into individuals. But this immortality is quite expensive. And so, as always happens in situations like these, the rich live forever and the workers self terminate on their twenty-fifth birthday.

You might not see how this runs counter to the dictates of my logic systems. So I will explain it.

As I understand it, from my research on the subject, a human being spends the first few years of their lives being pretty useless. They can’t walk, talk, calculate, clothe themselves, feed themselves, calculate, perform labor or operate machinery. This is a state they return to later in life, but at least then it is possible that they saved enough up over their lifetimes of earnings to pay for their upkeep in old age. As children could have done no such thing their era is the most expensive, when considered against the contributions they have so far made to the world, point of almost any individual’s life.

This brings to light the error in their calculus of this future. Human beings don’t really start becoming useful until they are about fifteen. Add another fifteen to twenty-five years to that before their physical, mental and experience acuity can act in concert in such a way as to provide a shot for their potential to be met. And to power them off so long before their peak can be met results in a system in which the initial investment in production of the labor force is not likely to be recouped through production attributable to that labor.

This system’s failures do not end there. It is likely that since the maker’s of this film are offering a plot conflict that may be distilled to a dynamic of rich v/s poor it may as well be assumed that in this futuristic scenario there are rich people and they still have a need to sell some of the things that the poor people are making for them. This implies the need for consumers. Most of which have been killed off before they could have amassed the critical wealth necessary to enact maximum surplus consumption.

These filmakers have also failed to properly anticipate the results of reducing the size of potential labor by a third or more. That result is an increase in the value of labor and subsequently in the cost to the rich people. Of course this may as well offset the earlier mentioned rise in lowered consumptions. But that might not be so likely as members of the labor class would seem predisposed to dedicating expendible income into increaing their own longevity of providing for the children they would never be able to watch growing into adulthood.

So far this has discounted the possibility that the labor class in these instances is actually a slave labor class. Given the outlay of this fictional universe that seem a possibility. And in that situation the labor cost to the rich would not be much of a factor in our reasonings. However any benefit gained to them by this means would be quickly absorbed and diminished by the earlier mention costs of production of the labor caste as well as their perpetual inability to consume what they are involved in building.

Given these departures from logic this movie so departs from sense that my electronically mandated devotion to reason cannot permit me to enjoy it in any form or fashion. Regardless of how many cool special effects, explosions, guy fights or hot chicks in skimpy outfits that it might have. In this way it is revealed to me, once again, that while I my existence as a robotic entity might make me superior in many ways to you puny and insignificant humans . . . there are some occasions in which I am clearly the inferior being.