It’s a crude, but accurate depiction of the casual cruelty of capitalism.
This is the first thought I had, watching Justin Timberlake catch his weirdly young mother as she died. And with the casual dismissiveness with which people regarded “timing out.” Of course people are going to be resentful and revolt—their lives are on the line! In capitalism, you’d need to maintain a working class, not watch them all die off in a ghetto.
As a shallow interpretation of Marxist critique, the film works well enough. There is irony in this in the unsubtle marks of sequel baiting, “the adventure continues” and so on and so forth.
I suppose I still don’t understand how putting a million years into the ghetto helps anything. The way I see it, they wouldn’t be wasting a year’s worth to get to the obscenely expensive 1% world. They’d be better off taking their new wealth to a slightly better area and working to maintain their new bounty and live to see another day. But then, I suppose that isn’t as dramatic as the march into the wealthy world, and it might be a thought too deep for this flashy film.
It's also pretty interesting how their way of life is so ingrained in the people, that even the "minutemen" that come after the protagonists seem to be little more than laborers themselves.
ReplyDeleteI agree – it would have been nicer to see the million years go into something different rather than a rough area. Possibly the working class or maybe to people who are dying or in desperate need of time. Also, the ending was a little confusing, so they just keep robbing banks for time? Seems like a cause for disaster, or maybe it could be good for this world they live in after all?
ReplyDeleteThe point of this wasn't the million years. The point was that there was an artificial scarcity designed to keep people where they were. They had enough for everyone to live on until they die naturally. But to keep this going, the rich on top, there has to be a bottom, that knows it's a bottom. They needed to give people just enough, just the thought of the possibility that they could live forever, eternally young, means they have to take it away for somebody. The actual amount of years that they have is less important than the thought that they don't HAVE to stay where they are. The point was that if people realize that things could change, they would. So the idea a million years being spread around to people who previously could only see to the end of the month meant that now there wasn't any need to be in that oppressive system that was killing them.
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