Memento

Wait a minute. What am I doing here?…….

Oh right! The Memento Review.

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Yes. I just did that 🙂

Memento is about Leonard, played with great finesse by Guy Pierce, who suffers from anterograde amnesia which is short-term memory loss. He is not able to make any new memories. “What’s the last thing you remember?” asks a bartender. “My wife,” he says “dying”. He remembers everything that happened before his wife was raped and murdered. But after that, no new memory. He will remember what he is talking about for a short period and in a few minutes will wonder how the hell he got there. All he wants now is ‘revenge’. 

He is organized in living with his “condition”. He has polaroids of his car, where he is living and the people, he must remember to take his revenge, each containing a cryptic message to give him an idea of the life he was living before his most recent short-term memory loss. “Don’t trust his lies” is the message below Teddy- a guy who seems to be trying to help him. Along with this, he has tattoos of the important things he must remember- the facts about his wife’s killer. There is a lot in the plot that can be discussed, but one of the integral parts of watching it is discovering things as the movie reveals itself step by step.

More than the plot, Memento is an intelligently executed movie. Especially how it deconstructs time. There is a coloured timeline that goes backwards (yes you read that right), black and white scenes that move forward and there are flashbacks about his wife’s murder. I know- it’s very confusing when you put it that way. But Nolan does a genius job of putting the pieces together. If you get into Memento without any idea of how it executes. The execution itself will shock you because it is just so original. Memento is an epitome to show how execution changes everything.

Memento starts with an actual reverse in-time scene- trying to hint to the audience how the movie is going proceed. The first scene is in fact Leonard killing the murderer and from then on, we go backwards to see how he reached there. The coloured scenes are like taking one step back repetitively and connecting each dot carefully. And after every revelation, the bigger picture of the film changes radically. The main reason why this execution is so perfect is that it makes the audience relate to Leonard’s “condition”. Every time go back in time, we struggle to keep up with what has already been shown. Every time we go back a little and stop at a scene we were shown previously. And this keeps the audience so much on their toes, trying to figure out what exactly is happening and connecting the clues just like Leonard. The movie is thrilling and absolutely absorbing start to end (or may I say end to start).