Try to imagine a future where the super-rich live in gated, patrolled fortress-communities, completely isolated from the short, brutish lives of the underclass who must toil or die, just a paycheck away from having their life-force literally terminated by the powers that be. No, it's not America under a Mitt Romney presidency, but the premise of "In Time," the latest dystopian-future movie from director/screenwriter Andrew Niccol ("Gattaca," "The Truman Show").
Niccol's near-future sci-fi film plays like some sort of mutant Karl Marx/Philip K. Dick hybrid, where the "cost of living" has become a literal concept. People have been genetically modified to never age past 25, but there's a catch: While your first 25 years are on the house, after that the clock starts ticking. Everyone has a glowing digital time-code imprinted on their forearm, and time is the currency in which you earn and pay for everything — rent, bus fare, a cup of coffee. Run out of time and it's game over. The rich, meanwhile, have become the undead, with centuries at their disposal.
Justin Timberlake plays an angry young member of the 99 percent who — after watching a loved-one's clock run out — decides to get payback, using some inherited time to buy his way into a gated community, and kidnapping a wealthy financier's daughter (Amanda Seyfried) when the cops, led by Cillian Murphy, come to bust him. It's Patty Hearst all over again, as the rich girl soon comes to sympathize with her righteously proletarian captor and they scramble to take down the system.