In Time is one of those little B-films that takes you totally by surprise and winds up being way better than you ever expected, way better than most A-films manage to be with their gigantic budgets, coiffed superstars, and exalted directors. It reminded me of my reaction to the movie Gone, another great little B-film (also staring Amanda Seyfried, who is obviously quite good at picking scripts) that was way better than it should have been.

A lot of sci-fi films attempt to create huge, sprawling metaphors for the state of our current society – The Matrix, Avatar, and Cloud Atlas spring to mind, though there are many others. But I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a metaphorical representation of our society quite as clever and apt as the one in In Time, in which a person’s literal “time alive” has become the one and only currency in society, logged on computers in people’s forearms, most of it hoarded in vaults by elite sectors of the population, and the little remaining time spread among billions, who fight and scrape all their miserable lives for additional days and weeks of life.

This story edifice is so ingenious that you are overwhelmed by the parallels to modern society. Just the literal representation of “living day-to-day” has a remarkable impact. The rich casually gamble thousands of years of people’s lives in single poker games, and manipulate markets to keep the vast rest of society in a clenched state of desperation. The superfluous population (i.e. everyone but the elite sectors who own everything) are kept in separate geographic zones by an intricate system of global financial laws, enforced by militarized units called “time keepers.” These time keepers were my favorite part of the story; they completely identify with the ultra rich who employ them, even though they are only fed time-alive in small increments throughout each day, constantly keeping them mere hours from death like the very people they police so visciously (time keepers don’t operate in the elite sectors, of course.)

This device of the “time keepers” perfectly captures the way the small, bureaucratic middle layer of American society – middle management grunts at financial institutions and in the media, functionaries at spy agencies like the NSA and CIA, engineers within the military industrial complex, upper echelons of the military, and the U.S. prison industry – falsely associate with their elite masters, even though they are only marginally better off than the superfluous rabble they are paid to kill, defraud, arrest and imprison. I’ve never seen this aspect of society tackled in such a direct and gusty way.

The eventual theme of In Time is how to rectify the widespread abject misery caused by socio-economic polarization and extreme concentration of wealth. Its answer is essentially radical redistribution of wealth. This of course is at present a violently unpopular idea in the United States, where the poor cling like leaches to the ridiculous idea that they might one day join the ultra-rich, own their own island, collect Ferraris, buy a submarine with gold faucets, and travel around in a private jet to their luxury homes all over the world. In Time does miss this one aspect of the problem – the poor don’t long for economic fairness, the poor long to become flithy rich, so they can start shitting on everybody else. But this does not change the fact that normal people should be thinking about how (and why) to reverse, or at least slow down, the ever-accelerating concentration of wealth on our society.

I can only assume that In Time was a flop because it made people in our society uncomfortable. Most sci-fi allegories can be easily dismissed. In Time is different – its theme and its message are a little too in-your-face and a little to spot-on to allow an emotionally asleep audience to remain asleep while watching the film. I highly recommend this provocative and interesting little sleeper!