In a dystopian future where the aging gene is switched off at 25, time has replaced money as the world's only currency—allowing the rich to live forever while the poor must constantly beg, borrow, or steal minutes just to survive the day. When a desperate factory worker named Will Salas is falsely accused of murder after receiving a century of time from a suicidal stranger, he goes on the run and takes the daughter of a powerful tycoon hostage. Together, they form an unlikely alliance, embarking on a dangerous, Robin Hood-style crusade to rob time banks and dismantle the corrupt system before their own clocks run out.
Information |
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|---|---|
Language |
English |
Country |
United States |
Premiere date |
October 28, 2011 |
Running time |
109 minutes |
Genre |
Action Sci-Fi Thriller |
Budget |
$40,000,000 |
Box Office |
$173,930,596 |
Crew |
|
Directed by |
Andrew Niccol |
Produced by |
Eric Newman Marc Abraham Andrew Niccol |
Written by |
Andrew Niccol |
Music by |
Craig Armstrong |
Cinematography |
Roger Deakins |
Edited by |
Zach Staenberg |
Production Co. |
Regency Enterprises New Regency Pictures Strike Entertainment |
Distributed by |
20th Century Fox |
Official Trailer
The Plot
The Currency of Life and Death
In the year 2169, humanity had conquered the ravages of age through profound genetic engineering. Every human being was designed to stop aging entirely on their twenty-fifth birthday, preserving them in the prime of their physical youth. However, this scientific marvel came with a brutal, inescapable caveat: upon turning twenty-five, a glowing digital clock embedded into the forearm of every citizen would activate, granting them exactly one free year of life. From that moment forward, time itself became the sole, universal fiat currency. Seconds, minutes, hours, and years were directly transferred from person to person through physical contact, or stored in metallic flash-drive-like capsules and secure bank vaults. When a person's clock mercilessly ticked down to thirteen zeros, they "timed out," and their heart stopped instantly, dropping them dead in their tracks.
This ruthless economy birthed a society deeply fractured by class, divided into heavily guarded sectors known as Time Zones. The poorest of these was Dayton, a bleak manufacturing hub functioning as a sprawling ghetto where youth dominated the population. In Dayton, citizens practically lived day-to-day, or more accurately, hour-to-hour. It was a place where people worked grueling factory shifts just to earn enough minutes to survive the night, and where an individual rarely held more than twenty-four hours on their forearm at any given time. Across the insurmountable border lay New Greenwich, the glittering, opulent zone of the plutocrats. There, the affluent hoarded thousands of years, effectively rendering themselves immortal. The elite of New Greenwich did not merely hold biological time; they stored their vast fortunes in a decentralized, blockchain-like digital cryptocurrency called TIME. This immutable ledger allowed them to back up and transfer their lifespans outside their physical bodies, ensuring absolute security and eternal wealth while the rest of the world perished for the cost of a cup of coffee.
A Fatal Encounter at the Bar
Will Salas, a twenty-eight-year-old factory worker living in the bleak confines of Dayton, understood the cruelty of the system intimately. He lived with his mother, Rachel, who appeared just as young as he did, and together they scraped by on the meager hours their labor provided. One evening, Will sought a brief respite in a dingy local bar, only to witness a scene that immediately set his nerves on edge. A sharply dressed man was recklessly flaunting his forearm, the glowing green digits displaying a staggering one hundred and sixteen years. The man was Henry Hamilton, a wealthy, intoxicated 105-year-old who had wandered far from the safety of New Greenwich.
Hamilton’s display had attracted the attention of the Minute Men, a ruthless gang of time-robbing thugs consisting of middle-aged men led by an elderly-minded, sharply dressed British mobster named Fortis. As Fortis and his gang moved in to forcefully harvest Hamilton's centuries, Will acted on instinct. Risking his own dwindling life, Will fought through the scuffle, grabbed the drunken aristocrat, and dragged him out of the bar, navigating the shadows of the ghetto to a secure hiding place away from the prowling gang.
The Burden of Immortality
Safe in the quiet dampness of an abandoned building, Hamilton finally sobered up enough to speak. Will angrily questioned the man's sanity, arguing that no one should die before their time naturally ended, but Hamilton offered a bleak, world-weary smile. He confessed that despite his youthful appearance, he was entirely exhausted. "Your mind can be spent, even if your body is not," Hamilton whispered in the dark. "We want to die. We need to."
Hamilton then shattered Will’s understanding of the world. He revealed that there was, in fact, more than enough time for every human being to live a long, full life. The scarcity was artificially engineered. The elite of New Greenwich deliberately hoarded the time, controlling the population of the poor by exploiting the Time Zone system and constantly inflating taxes and the cost of living. "For a few to be immortal, many must die," Hamilton explained softly. "Otherwise, where would you put them?" The poor were systematically bled dry to sustain the rich.
The next morning, while Will was in a deep sleep, Hamilton silently reached over and locked his wrist onto Will's. In a quiet, glowing transfer, Hamilton poured one hundred and sixteen years of biological time into Will's arm, keeping only five minutes for himself. He also left Will access to his private, heavily encrypted wallet of TIME cryptocurrency, granting the factory worker unprecedented entry into the digital wealth of the elite. Hamilton then walked away, heading to a high bridge spanning a concrete aqueduct. He sat on the edge, watching his final seconds tick down. Will woke up, saw his glowing arm, and sprinted after Hamilton, but he arrived just as the man's timer hit zero. Hamilton’s heart stopped, and his lifeless body tumbled gracefully into the rushing river below. Soon after, the Timekeepers—the heavily armed, police-like enforcers of the time system—arrived to investigate. While a sharp young Timekeeper named Jaeger correctly deduced that Hamilton had deliberately "timed out," his superior, a hardened, middle-aged veteran named Raymond Leon, stubbornly believed that a Dayton resident had murdered the rich man and stolen his centuries.
A Tragic Miscalculation
Overwhelmed by the sudden influx of wealth, Will sought out his closest friend, Borel. Knowing the dangers of carrying a century on one's arm in a desperate place like Dayton, Borel frantically warned Will against possessing such an excess of time in the ghetto. Heeding the warning, Will gripped Borel's arm and generously transferred ten years to him—one full year for every year they had been friends. Will then departed, his heart set on reuniting with his mother, Rachel, to finally relocate them both to the safety and luxury of New Greenwich.
However, the cruel mechanics of the system were already at work. That same evening, Rachel had finished her grueling two-day shift in the Garment District. She had been forced to liquidate her earnings immediately to pay off a desperate two-day loan she had taken just to survive the week. Exhausted, she arrived at the bus stop, expecting to pay the usual fare to return to Dayton. To her horror, the ambivalent driver informed her that the price of the bus ride had suddenly been increased. Rachel found herself horribly short on time. Pleading with the driver yielded nothing; he coldly advised her to run.
Faced with a devastating two-hour journey on foot and only a fraction of that time remaining on her clock, Rachel began to sprint in a sheer panic, watching her life literally slip away with every desperate stride. She begged passing strangers for a loan, but the destitute residents of Dayton averted their eyes, clutching their own precious minutes. Realizing she was late, Will ran her bus route from the opposite direction, his eyes scanning the crowds. Finally, they spotted each other on a bleak stretch of road. Rachel sprinted toward him with her last ounce of strength, leaping into her son's arms. But as their hands brushed, her timer flashed its final zero. She died instantly, less than a second before Will could initiate the transfer. Holding his mother's lifeless body in the dirt, the agonizing inequity of the system shattered Will. Remembering Hamilton's words, he vowed to avenge Rachel by taking the people of New Greenwich for everything they had.
Crossing the Divide
Armed with over a century on his arm and the digital keys to Hamilton's TIME crypto reserves, Will initiated his plan. He crossed the borders between the Time Zones, a grueling process where the toll gates charged exorbitant amounts of time designed specifically to ensure the poor could never pass. Will paid the steep prices without flinching, shedding years just to pass through the heavily fortified gates until he finally arrived in the opulent, pristine streets of New Greenwich. He arrived in style, dressing in tailored clothes that allowed him to blend in with the eternally youthful plutocrats.
Will made his way to an exclusive casino, a place where fortunes of time were casually thrown across the velvet tables. There, he caught the attention of Philippe Weis, a massively powerful tycoon and time-loaning businessman who possessed tens of thousands of years on his own arm and vast reserves of TIME coin in unbreachable vaults. Beside Philippe stood his striking daughter, Sylvia, who watched Will with an intrigued, careful gaze, having noticed his arrival in the city. Will sat at the high-stakes poker table with Philippe. The tension in the room thickened as Will, displaying an unnatural fearlessness, bet practically his entire lifespan on a single hand. He nearly timed out as the wager drained his arm down to the last seconds, but as the final card was revealed, Will emerged victorious. He won over a millennium, the massive influx of time lighting up his forearm. Fascinated by his reckless disregard for life, Sylvia invited Will to an exclusive party at her father's sprawling mansion later that night.
The Jaguar and the Ocean
Determined to play the part of a wealthy elite, Will visited a high-end dealership and laid eyes on a flawless, classic Jaguar E-Type convertible. The salesman smoothly informed him the price was fifty-nine years of his time, plus tax. Will paid it without a second thought, the glowing digits transferring effortlessly from his arm. He drove the roaring Jaguar along the polished coastal roads to the Weis mansion, pulling up to a party filled with people who had forgotten how to live because they had forgotten how to die.
Inside the opulent estate, Will found Sylvia. The two danced, the chemistry between them undeniable, though Will's raw, uncalculated movements stood in stark contrast to the stiff, overly cautious elite. Feeling the suffocating atmosphere of the party, Will challenged Sylvia, convincing her to leave the mansion and run down to the beach to swim in the dark ocean—an act of spontaneous danger that the rich, paralyzed by the fear of accidental death, never dared to do. For a brief moment, they felt truly alive in the freezing surf.
Their escape was abruptly cut short. As Will and Sylvia emerged from the water, they were surrounded by Timekeepers. Raymond Leon stepped forward, his eyes locked onto Will. Leon confidently declared that Will was under arrest for the murder of Henry Hamilton. Will vehemently claimed his innocence, but Leon had no interest in proving guilt. Explaining coldly that such a vast amount of time simply did not belong in Dayton, the veteran Timekeeper seized Will's arm. Bypassing any legal procedure, Leon forcefully confiscated over a millennium of Will's stolen wealth, draining his clock down to a meager two hours.
Hostage and the Crash
Realizing he was about to be executed by the system, Will reacted with explosive speed. He overpowered the nearest guards, grabbed Sylvia, and dragged her away, using her as a hostage to ensure his exit. He shoved her into the passenger seat of the Jaguar E-Type and tore out of the mansion's driveway, driving fiercely back toward the bleak borders of Dayton. Sylvia screamed in terror, but Will kept his foot pressed hard on the accelerator.
The journey back to the ghetto proved disastrous. As they crossed back into the grim industrial decay of Dayton, Will drove straight into a trap. Fortis and his Minute Men had set up a deliberate roadblock. Caught off guard, Will swerved violently to avoid the armed thugs, sending the beautiful Jaguar plunging off the road. The car smashed violently into a dry concrete flood control channel, the impact knocking both Will and Sylvia unconscious.
Fortis and his gang slowly descended into the channel, pulling the unconscious pair from the wreckage. Fortis eagerly grabbed Will's arm, expecting to harvest the century of time he had missed out on at the bar. To his immense disappointment, he found Will's clock nearly empty. Infuriated, Fortis turned to Sylvia and began draining her aristocratic reserves. He would have drained her completely, but the distant, piercing wail of approaching Timekeeper sirens forced the gang to scatter. Fortis fled, leaving Will and Sylvia alive with exactly thirty minutes each remaining on their clocks.
Running on Empty
Will jolted awake, the burning green digits on his arm warning him of his impending death. He immediately checked Sylvia, transferring a few of his precious minutes to her just to ensure they could both make it out of the flood channel. Abandoning the wrecked Jaguar, they stumbled through the dilapidated streets of Will's old neighborhood. Desperate, Will led Sylvia to Borel's residence, hoping to reclaim a small portion of the ten years he had generously gifted his friend.
When they arrived, Borel's wife, Greta, opened the door, her eyes red and swollen from crying. In a tearful, devastated voice, she explained that Borel was dead. The sudden influx of wealth had been too much for a man used to surviving minute by minute; he had gone to the local bar and literally drunk himself to death, passing away with nine full years still glowing uselessly on his clock.
With their time bleeding away and no friends left to help, Will and Sylvia hurried to a grim local pawn shop. Sylvia removed her flawless diamond earrings, laying them on the scratched glass counter. For jewelry that would have cost decades in New Greenwich, the pawnbroker callously offered them a meager two days. With no choice, they accepted the trade. Finding a temporary shelter in a rundown hotel room, Will decided to leverage his hostage. He called Philippe Weis directly, demanding a one-thousand-year ransom to be paid immediately into the Dayton time-mission, a charity for the desperate. Weis, cold and calculating, flatly refused to negotiate with a terrorist and hung up the phone. Realizing the tycoon cared more about his wealth than his daughter, Will gently told Sylvia that her father wasn't going to pay. True to his moral core, Will told her she was free to go, deciding to release her despite the danger it put him in.
Turning the Tables
Before Sylvia could leave, the door was kicked open. Raymond Leon had traced the location from Will's phone call and stepped into the room, his weapon drawn. He moved to arrest Will, but the sudden betrayal by her father and the stark reality of the ghetto had profoundly changed Sylvia. Acting on pure instinct, she grabbed a gun and fired, shooting the veteran Timekeeper squarely in the shoulder. Leon dropped his weapon and collapsed against the wall, groaning in pain.
As Leon bled, his clock began to fluctuate. Disarmed and vulnerable, the Timekeeper was moments away from timing out. Despite everything, Will walked over to the wounded man, gripped his arm, and transferred two full hours of his own time to Leon. "That's enough for you to walk out of Dayton and survive until your squad retrieves you," Will said coldly. Will and Sylvia then fled, stealing Leon's heavily reinforced patrol car.
Driving out of the immediate slums, they used the flashing lights of the Timekeeper vehicle to pull over a wealthy New Greenwich resident who was passing near the border. They forcefully robbed the terrified woman of her time and her luxurious limousine. In the back of the stolen limo, Will turned to Sylvia, offering her one last chance to walk away from the madness. Sylvia looked at her forearm, then at Will, and declared that there was absolutely no purpose to the life she had once lived in New Greenwich. She was fully committed.
Robberies and the Father's Technique
The pair began a relentless, high-stakes crusade to crash the entire system. They systematically targeted Philippe Weis's sprawling network of Time Banks, smashing through security glass and stealing heavily armored Time Capsules. They drove through the poorest districts, handing out these capsules to the destitute and watching as the glowing time brought immediate salvation to the starving masses. Their actions did not go unnoticed; the government slapped a ten-year bounty on their heads, labeling them the most dangerous criminals in the country.
Wanted and constantly on the run, they sought refuge by renting out an entire luxury hotel, using the sheer size of the building to hide. But the massive bounty attracted predators. Fortis, having tracked them down a second time, ambushed the couple in their opulent hideout. This time, there was no running. Fortis challenged Will to a brutal "Time Fight"—a deadly contest of wrist-wrestling where the combatants locked arms and tried to forcibly drain the other's life clock to zero.
Fortis, relying on his vicious experience, quickly gained the upper hand, pushing Will's clock dangerously close to expiration. But Will had been trained in the harsh slums of Dayton. Drawing on a specific, grueling technique taught to him by his late father, Will feigned weakness, allowing Fortis to overextend. In a sudden, explosive reversal, Will twisted their locked wrists, overpowering the mobster. The green digits on Fortis's arm plummeted rapidly, hitting zero. The mob boss's eyes rolled back as he timed out, collapsing dead on the floor. Will then swiftly drew his weapon and dispatched the rest of the Minute Men, ending their reign of terror for good.
The Million-Year Heist
Despite their victories against the gangs and their successful bank robberies, Will and Sylvia soon realized a crushing truth: their efforts were ultimately futile. The elite possessed the absolute power to maintain the status quo. To compensate for the extra time Will and Sylvia distributed, the authorities simply raised the cost of living, jacking up prices on food, rent, and transportation in the ghettos faster than the poor could spend their newly acquired time.
Realizing that small robberies would never break the monopoly, they devised a masterstroke. They infiltrated Philippe Weis's private, heavily guarded headquarters in New Greenwich. Navigating the elite security systems, they breached Weis's personal vault and laid their hands on the ultimate prize: a massive, glowing one-million-year Time Capsule. Before leaving, Will confronted Philippe directly, staring the tycoon down. "Nobody should be immortal," Will told him with quiet fury, "if even one person has to die." With the million years secured, they fled back toward Dayton to distribute the monumental fortune.
The Final Chase and the Per Diem
Their escape was immediately detected, and Raymond Leon, fully recovered and consumed by obsession, led a furious pursuit. Leon chased them relentlessly from the pristine roads of New Greenwich all the way back into the grim streets of Dayton. The high-speed chase culminated in a violent collision; Leon rammed his patrol car directly into Will and Sylvia's vehicle, bringing them to a grinding halt. Battered and bleeding, Will scrambled from the wreckage just as a crowd gathered. He shoved the massive one-million-year Time Capsule into the hands of a young ghetto girl, shouting at her to distribute it among the people immediately.
Will and Sylvia tried to run, but Leon intercepted them just outside the city limits, holding them at gunpoint in a desolate, sun-scorched wasteland. There was nowhere left to hide. As Leon ordered them to their knees, Will looked closely at the veteran Timekeeper. He noticed the subtle, hardened mannerisms that separated Leon from the soft-born guards of New Greenwich. Will correctly guessed the truth: Leon had been born in the ghettos of Dayton, just like him, but had managed to successfully circumvent the system to become an enforcer for the very people who oppressed them.
With their timers bleeding down to their final minutes, Will jokingly asked Leon to return some of the two hours he had previously loaned him, just so they could survive long enough to face their official executions. Leon sneered, maintaining his weapon's aim. But as he stood there, a sudden realization washed over the veteran's face. In his blind, obsessive pursuit of Will and Sylvia, Leon had neglected to collect his daily Timekeeper per diem—his day's salary. Before Leon could react, the clock on his forearm flashed zero. The gun slipped from his fingers, and Raymond Leon dropped dead in the dust.
Will and Sylvia stood up, but their victory was overshadowed by the flashing green digits on their own arms. They were left with mere seconds to live. Panic set in. Will's eyes darted to Leon's parked patrol vehicle. Remembering the emergency time rations kept in police cars, Will sprinted with everything he had. He reached the car, smashed the compartment, and absorbed the allotted time into his arm. He spun around. Sylvia was running toward him, her face mirroring the exact, agonizing terror his mother had shown. The distance closed. Will stretched out his hand. In a flawless, redemptive mirror of his mother's tragic death, Will caught Sylvia and locked his wrist to hers, transferring the life-saving time just seconds before she was about to die.
Crashing the System
With their lives secured, Will and Sylvia looked back toward the city. The distribution of the million-year capsule had ignited a revolution. The government had slapped an unprecedented one-hundred-year bounty on their heads, but it no longer mattered. A wave of chaos and liberation swept across the nation.
Television broadcasts beamed images of the unthinkable: the massive manufacturing factories in Dayton were shutting down completely. The workers, now flush with enough time to sustain themselves indefinitely, abandoned their assembly lines. The streets were filled with thousands of factory workers, now rich with time, freely crossing the borders and walking straight into the luxurious Time Zones of New Greenwich. The rich watched in absolute horror, struggling to cope with the sudden, overwhelming surge of the people they had oppressed for centuries.
Seeing the utter collapse of the system and witnessing the consequences of Leon's fatal obsession with the pair, Jaeger, now the ranking Timekeeper, ordered all his men to stand down and return home. The authorities could no longer hold back the tide. Meanwhile, on a quiet street, Will Salas and Sylvia Weis checked their weapons. Staring up at the towering facade of an obscenely huge Time Bank, the two lovers smiled, preparing to continue their crusade and disrupt the system until every last stolen second was returned.
Top Cast
- Justin Timberlake as Will Salas
- Amanda Seyfried as Sylvia Weis
- Cillian Murphy as Timekeeper Raymond Leon
- Vincent Kartheiser as Philippe Weis
- Olivia Wilde as Rachel Salas
- Matt Bomer as Henry Hamilton
- Alex Pettyfer as Fortis
- Johnny Galecki as Borel
- Yaya DaCosta as Greta
- Ethan Peck as Carlo
