There are not many film directors who I admire and whose films I look forward to seeing more than Andrew Niccol. In the world within his upcoming film In Time starring Justin Timberlake and Amanda Seyfried, people stop aging at age 25, and have to keep working to earn themselves more time. Purchases are measured not in dollars but in minutes that are debited against a person’s remaining life. Want a coffee? That is four minutes debited off your life clock. The corollary to this is that if you’re obscenely wealthy you could live indefinitely as long as you have money left on your clock. Timberlake’s character receives a boon of over 100 years of life from an old man, the unfortunate effect of which makes it seem that he’s responsible for the stranger’s subsequent death. Off he goes running, being chased by bad guys, somehow dragging Seyfried’s character along for the ride.

The stories in Niccol’s films works in the same way that many of the great works of science fiction does; that is, they ask mind-provoking “what if” questions.

Consider Gattaca, the excellent first movie he wrote and directed, in which he asks the question, “what happens when discrimination based on your genetic code is the societal norm?” In The Truman Show, the question is “what if your life is nothing more than part of a staged TV show?” In S1m0ne he asks “what if you could create a lifelike movie star entirely within the computer”?

In Time poses this interesting question: “What if time literally is money?” I’m really curious to find out what his answer might look like.