One of the nice things about Comic-Con is when a film that has been largely under the radar erupts out of the ground, like one of the bigger bugs in Starship Troopers. Er. Anyway, such an emergence happened today with In Time, the sci-fi thriller from writer/director Andrew Niccol which stars Justin Timberlake and Amanda Seyfried.
The premise of the film is probably best expressed by Niccol. "The good news is that you stop aging at 25 years old. The bad news is that you’re only given 1 more year to live, so you have to buy time, to earn time. The world of the film will look familiar because...everyone is engineered to have a body clock, but this invention is the end of every other invention. The poor have no time to create anything new, and the rich have no incentive – why invent a new car when I could do it 100 years from now?"
The clip reel we saw has Timberlake as a working stiff, struggling to earn time working in a factory and plagued by rising prices (his daily coffee now costs 4 minutes of life and rising quotas mean his daily wage of hours is going down). He is gifted with enormous time wealth after helping a stranger escape Alex Pettyfer's criminal type - but he's also framed for murder and finds police officer Cillian Murphy on his tail. It all looked like Gattaca but grittier, and considerably more action-packed, with Murphy channeling an almost Equilibrium-style policeman (coming from us, that's a compliment). Looks like we all need to prepare for Justin Timberlake: action star. See for yourself below:
Said Niccol, "Casting was hard because I was looking for new souls and old souls, because although everyone looks 25, they can be 105. Even a small role, like a bus driver or a priest where you'd usually cast a worn-out character actor, I had to find a worn-out character actor in a 25 year old body."
Timberlake added, "I was a HUGE fan of Gattaca and The Truman Show, and Andrew called me and we sat down and talked. My favourite action movies as a kid were First Blood, The Fugitive, Die Hard, but what I loved about all of those were they were everyday men doing extraordinary things. That’s how he sold me on this guy. I am scared shitless of putting on the tights of a character that already exists, but it seemed cool to me to have this character, and this thriller of this ordinary guy trying to stay alive."
Here's an exclusive clip from the press conference held at the Con, along with some new stills from the film.
In Time is out in the UK on November 1 this year.