(This review may contain spoilers).
Immortality is something humanity seems to be obsessed with. There are instances of it in history – like with the Pharaohs in Egypt, or Elizabeth Bathory. And innumerable films, television shows, books, etc. have immortal characters. Or a quest for immortality. Or something to do with living forever… or an abnormally long time.
So… with all of these different mediums dealing with immortality, it must be fairly difficult to come up with a new and different way of exploring it in fiction.
The idea of spending time rather than money is quite an interesting one. Of course, it’s going to be the same as now – the rich stay rich and the poor stay poor. But in this case, being too poor means that you’re going to die, no matter how healthy you might look.
One of the truly well-done things about this film is the wide variety of different ways people deal with this society. You get the Robin Hood types, who give away all that they can without putting themselves too low. There are the ones who use it for sport and for crime. People who like to pretend that those without the years don’t die… There’s a good representative of all these in this film.
The actors are particularly good here. The characters are well-acted and although there was a romance that moved a bit quickly, it wasn’t anything really annoying about it. There were a few stereotypes in the characters, but on the whole, I think they were handled reasonably well.
The idea about the different zones was pretty cool and how you couldn’t move through them unless you had a certain amount of time. The desperation that the characters in zone 1 had to live with came across really well and I did care about what happened to them.
There wasn’t much mystery in this film, but there were a lot of intense moments that had me pausing in what I was doing to watch, even though I’d already watched this movie several times before.
I would definitely recommend this film as a good one to watch, at least in my opinion.
Ink of Blood 