After stretching his legs in the arthouse scene with 1998's Following, Christopher Nolan gets a little more mainstream in this swervy, concept-rich tale of amnestic vengeance. Guy Pearce plays a man with short-term memory loss, constantly overwriting the VHS tape of his near-past as he tracks a nameless, faceless killer. He employs some blunt methods for retaining important information - hand-written notes and Polaroids for loose facts, tattoos for solid truths - but when you're operating on such a short timer (the dreaded memory wipe seems to occur every ten minutes), I suppose you've got to take what you can get, even if it makes you a target for manipulation.
The whole fable unfolds in a sort of stuttered reverse, immediately revealing the plot's ending before slowly walking back to its beginning, which leaves the viewer feeling almost as handicapped as Pearce. It's an early example of Nolan's experimental nature, his interest in tinkering with traditional storytelling formats to bend viewers' perceptions, and it works just as well here as we might expect from his later works. At each intersection, we're forced to second-guess everything we thought we knew, which continually changes the context of that first ten minute chunk. Our trust is earned, betrayed, diverted and rehabilitated.
Sure, sometimes it feels like this is more about the experiment than the plot (for all its ambition, the actual story is very small-scale), but conceptual risks carry a lot of weight with me and Memento is a verifiable playground for such things. It's as effective a "walk a mile in my shoes" experience as any I've seen on the big screen, and a large part of that can be credited to the Nolan brothers' peculiar knack for outside-the-box cinematic creativity.
Review by drqshadowBlockedParent2020-11-13T20:44:02Z
After stretching his legs in the arthouse scene with 1998's Following, Christopher Nolan gets a little more mainstream in this swervy, concept-rich tale of amnestic vengeance. Guy Pearce plays a man with short-term memory loss, constantly overwriting the VHS tape of his near-past as he tracks a nameless, faceless killer. He employs some blunt methods for retaining important information - hand-written notes and Polaroids for loose facts, tattoos for solid truths - but when you're operating on such a short timer (the dreaded memory wipe seems to occur every ten minutes), I suppose you've got to take what you can get, even if it makes you a target for manipulation.
The whole fable unfolds in a sort of stuttered reverse, immediately revealing the plot's ending before slowly walking back to its beginning, which leaves the viewer feeling almost as handicapped as Pearce. It's an early example of Nolan's experimental nature, his interest in tinkering with traditional storytelling formats to bend viewers' perceptions, and it works just as well here as we might expect from his later works. At each intersection, we're forced to second-guess everything we thought we knew, which continually changes the context of that first ten minute chunk. Our trust is earned, betrayed, diverted and rehabilitated.
Sure, sometimes it feels like this is more about the experiment than the plot (for all its ambition, the actual story is very small-scale), but conceptual risks carry a lot of weight with me and Memento is a verifiable playground for such things. It's as effective a "walk a mile in my shoes" experience as any I've seen on the big screen, and a large part of that can be credited to the Nolan brothers' peculiar knack for outside-the-box cinematic creativity.