"How am I supposed to heal if I cant feel time?"
Wow. This movie is one of the best I have seen in a while. First, the format of this movie is geniuinely insane. It's not good because it is complicated. The entire way things are set up helps create tension and bits of info. The tension in that one scene where he had his arm tattooed to not answer the phone... It is also good because it not only fits with what is happening and the themes, but it also makes for some great reveals and moments. For example, when Natalie is manipulating Lenny because she knows she can. It made my jaw drop and actually furious. The movie also made me pity Lenny so bad. It was very difficult for me to watch him deal with all the bullshit. The fact he was also being used by two different parties against each other was also insane. The entire story itself is also tragic when you realise he tried to force himself to believe his wife was killed by somebody. He tried to get rid of this guilt, but he ended up making himself believe that somebody had killed his wife. It was fucking devastating. He tried to convince himself he didnt kill her in some way, but with that came his own delusions forcing him onto a dangerous path where he ended up murdering people and fucking up his life and others' lives. The movie was also gripping due to this constant movement and pace building up. It made for a very enjoyable journey. If I have to say one thing that disappointed me, it was the ending. The ending is still good, but it also left me wanting more. I know adding more to the movie wouldn't have made much sense. However, it still made me mad that Lenny went off course, though he did it to himself when he lied to himself once again. This could eventually cause his life to derail even more, but it was still sad to see. Another extra little thing I wanna talk about is memory and how memory is a very dangerous part of humans as many things can be misremembered. I can really relate to this as a lot of the reviews I write are to remember how I felt about the thing right after instead of romanticizing certain things over time. Overall, what I will remember this movie for: The tragic story of Lenny. The perfectly structured story and its unique way of portraying events and using Lenny's condition. Finally, the gripping part of piecing together different information and thinking about how each information was given to Lenny (questioning every piece of info he had). It was a great movie that is super unique and will be pondering on for some time.
At Time of Review:
Solid 9/10
Story and Characters: 9/10
Presentation: 10/10
Enjoyability: 9/10
"Memento", a film directed by Christopher Nolan, released in 2000, is based on the story of the same name written by Jonathan Nolan. The film alone offers a unique cinematic experience and is about a man named Leonard Shelby (played by Guy Pearce) who has an accident that causes him to lose his short term memory, and he is forced into a time when Unlike everyone else, suffer from everyday forgetfulness.
In "Memnonto" the story unfolds inconsistently; Different parts are from the end to the beginning and other parts are from the beginning to the end to bring the experience of a state of amnesia similar to the main character to the audience. This story structure requires viewers to challenge and understand the story in a focused and intelligent way. Using its unique story structure, in a non-linear way where all the pieces of the story finally come together, the film "Memenonto" explores such characteristics as madness, madness, revenge and human psychology.
The conclusion for the movie "Memenonto" can be that this movie increases the excitement of the movie as much as possible and entertains and motivates the audience until the last moments by using the unique story structure and way of introducing information. Also, the film makes metaphors about issues such as memory, identity and reality, and talks about the ability of humans to control and maintain their truth and identity.
Finally, "Memnento" is known as one of the outstanding and admired works in the history of cinema, which has been able to attract the opinion of many critics and audiences both in its story structure and in its performance and acting. It is very new, it still remains as one of the most interesting movies in the cinema field.
The story about someone who is going to kill the murderer of his wife. The issue? He can't remember anything that has happened more than 10 minutes ago, and he is making photos and notes to help him on that. Yet, his notes and what people do or claim to do are contradicting often, and it becomes a mayor theme of the movie who he can even trust.
Often, movies with such a premise ended up being a mayor disappointment for me because the execution being pretty lackluster, but this one not so.
Pretty much every movie is just going forward, occasionally looking into the past for backgrounds of actions, or sometimes, like Deadpool 1, set the start of the movie of the past.
This is different from that. You begin with the end of the story, and you will literally discover the truth about how the story began at the very end of the movie. Not conspiracies or anything like that, but literally the whole timeline.
I think this is really a movie of it's own kind and can barely compared to any other. It is at times confusing, especially at the start if you are unaware of how the story is told in the first place.
Rating: 10/10
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 manicureVIP 4BlockedParent2021-05-01T14:36:59Z
"Memento" proved that a competent director, a revolutionary idea, and a decent cast could sometimes be enough to make a groundbreaking film. The film is essentially a neo-noir thriller played backward. Leonard is looking for the man who raped and killed his wife, but the traumatic events caused him short-term amnesia. Unable to store memories for more than a few minutes, he leaves clues for him to find, like scribbles, tattoos, and polaroid pictures. Every time Leonard loses his memories, he has to guess how things happened by looking through the clues he has.
At the beginning of the film, Leonard already found the killer, but cannot remember how. We are then progressively taken back in time and shown the events that lead to each piece of evidence. As the viewer only knows what would happen, but not how it happened, it's easy to feel in Leonard's shoes. Each episode starts where the following scene would end, and despite the fragmented storytelling, everything flows coherently. There is also a parallel timeline (shot in black and white) that proceeds forward in time to converge with the backward timeline in the end.
As the story progresses (or I should say, regresses), our view of Leonard and the other characters drastically changes, until we lose our trust in memory and reality. Facts and evidence are the foundations of truth and the only things that lead Leonard's search, but they cannot be reliable as they are subject to the influence of the individual who processed and recorded them. Leonard is so sure about the absolute value of facts and the impermanence of memories, but in the end, memories are the only things that help us define our reality. Wrong assumptions and fabricated evidence are enough to lead his search on the wrong path.
The success of "Memento" turned Christophe Nolan into one of the most prestigious directors in Hollywood, but at the same time caused his self-pressure to create increasingly revolutionary and conceptually complicated films, mostly with forced and incoherent results.