I saw “Memento” a night or two ago. This is perhaps the coolest movie I’ve seen in oh, I’d say a week at least. The brilliance of it comes through at so many levels it’s hard to cover them all, especially to an audience that hasn’t seen the whole thing before. The movie is just a completely masterful piece of work. It’s rather sad it took me, err, 5 years from the time the movie came out to see it. That’s okay though. I’ve seen it now, and you should too (assuming you haven’t… if you have, you should definitely look into watching it again for fun).
The first thing you may, or rather, will be forced, to notice is that the story it going to go backward. Now, don’t take it for the whole movie playing in reverse order. The first scene plays in reverse order to help us understand what’s going to happen, but the rest of the movie plays in a very backward yet forward fashion. By this I mean that there are forward playing scenes played in reverse order. In this way, the movie is a masterful piece of art, even if you hate the storyline.
The storyline is in itself another great piece of work. It’s not a whodunit in classic style, because we see that the main character has done it within the first 30 seconds of the film. It’s a whyhedunit. We don’t have a clue why the man has killed this other character, and, as we later come to find out, neither does he. He has short-term memory loss, so he can’t remember anything for more than 10 minutes or so. We later come to find out, as he does through exploring his impressive array of tattoo notes to himself, that a man has raped and killed his wife and he seeks revenge. When you can’t hold a train of thought for more than ten minutes, you’d think you’d have a hard time doing this, but he manages to make it through quite well, as we already saw in the opening credits. The twists and turns we take later (actually earlier) is why this man was killed, which isn’t as straight forward as we’d like to think when the movie begins.
After you take time to rearrange the story in the correct order in your brain, you realize that this would have been a great movie had it played in forward order, and it’s just marvelous in reverse fashion. I definitely recommend this to anyone who hasn’t seen it yet.
