"Some memories are best forgotten "
Directed by: Christopher Nolan
Starring : Guy Pearce, Carrie-Anne Moss
Genre : Crime, Mystery
Runtime : 113 minutes
WI's rating : 9.4
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| Leonard Shelby: I have to believe in a world outside my own mind. I have to believe that my actions still have meaning, even if I can't remember them. I have to believe that when my eyes are closed, the world's still there. Do I believe the world's still there? Is it still out there?... Yeah. We all need mirrors to remind ourselves who we are. I'm no different. |
The film loops backwards episodically to present a series of revelations about the main character, Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce), about the motives of his antagonists 'Teddy' (Joe Pantolino) and 'Natalie' (Carrie Ann Moss), and about the nature of Lenny's memory-loss condition. His condition 'isn't amnesia' (or so Lenny tells everyone he meets) but rather such severe short term memory loss that he is unable to assimilate and retain experience - in other words, to make new memories. Consequently, Lenny's identity, or more precisely his self-knowledge, is arrested at the moment he received a blow to his head while trying to stop intruders from raping his wife.
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| Leonard Shelby: I meet Sammy through work. Insurance. I was an investigator. I'd investigate the claims to see which ones were phony. I had to see through people's bullshit. It was useful experience, 'cause now it's my life. |
This is a film you definitely need to pay attention to, leave for ten minutes and you may find yourself lost. This film is quite different to others in the way it is shown. Instead of following in a chronological order which is easy to follow, this goes in reverse. Each colour scene is before the one you just saw, there are also black and white scenes which are in chronological order though. This definitely made the film sometimes difficult to follow and confusing, but that adds to the overall enjoyment of the film. It doesn't just improve the film by making it more confusing, it makes it better for reasons I can't really say other than it helps in terms of the characters and makes for one hell of a climax.
So, if you watch this movie and it confuses you the first or even the second time, I can assure you that is how you are meant to feel, confused. If you hated watching ‘Memento' the way Christopher Nolan intended, then I can only recommend that you get a hold of the DVD and watch it in chronological order, as it will really help you. Memento also shows how bad ‘mental disease' patients can be abused by healthy people and what lengths sick patients will go to try and keep ‘sane'. Also, if a movie makes you think, then in some way it has been successful in doing something that many movies do not do – making you think. Those sorts of cinematic experiences are the ones that we need to cherish for life, as they are few and far between. Memento is one such experience.
FYI
-The camera Leonard Shelby uses is a Polaroid 690.
-The medical condition experienced by Leonard in this film is a real condition called Anterograde Amnesia - the inability to form new memories after damage to the hippocampus. During the 1950s, doctors treated some forms of epilepsy by removing parts of the temporal lobe, resulting in the same memory problems.
-In one scene, Leonard quickly passes in front of a comic book store. The Batman logo is displayed prominently on the store's window. Christopher Nolan later directed Batman Begins (2005) and The Dark Knight
Spoiler Alert
read it for your own risk
Leonard found his wife being raped and murdered, and the killers incapacitated him and gave him short term memory loss. Unfortunately, his wife didn't die from the assault, so she lived in guilt. At the end (beginning?) of the movie, 'Teddy' tells Leonard that Sammy Jankis never existed. At the end of the film "Teddy" actually mentions this when he says something like "you are Sammy Jankis". Everything that we see happening to Sammy Jankis happened to Leonard in real life. So technically, Leonard killed his wife by injecting her with too much Insulin, but it was an accident.But due to Leonard's short term memory loss, he still believes that his wife died at the hands of a rapist / serial killer. So Teddy keeps finding low-life people for Leonard to murder so that he can feel compensated for his wife's 'tragic death.' But, Leonard finds out about Teddy's scheme, and before he forgets, he sets up Teddy as the next person to kill, hence the reason that in the opening of the film, Leonard kills Teddy and takes a picture of it. You have to assume that even though Leonard will forget about killing all of his victims, he'll have the picture to remind him that his task was completed, and that he can move on.
