‘Hmmm. I don’t feel drunk.’– Leonard Shelby, Memento (2000)
When I watch movies, along with many others out there, I love to be challenged. There’s nothing worse than coming out of the cinema and feeling like you knew what was going to happen all the way through the movie. So many films these days, suffer the same formulaic approach from paint-by-numbers writers and directors, that it can become difficult to find something that truly tests your ability to understand the narrative completely. There are exceptions of course but these are very few and far between, Ex Machina (2015), Shutter Island (2010), and Inception (2010) being examples in more recent times.
I recently scoured through my DVD collection to watch something that I hadn’t seen in a while that blew my mind the first time I saw it, to see if this was still the case. I stumbled across Chistopher Nolan’s Memento, a film I have always loved and one that I do not watch too often as I love to forget the important plot details.
‘I take it i’ve told you about my condition?’ – Leonard Shelby, Memento (2000)
Upon reflection, and debating the different theories which I do everytime, I considered that Memento could be Mr. Nolan’s greatest work as a Director.
By no means a commercial success compared to his more recent work, taking a ‘measly’ $39 million worldwide at the box office, this is Nolan’s most ambitious work to date before he became ‘Hollywood’ and had studio heads to worry about. Sure The Dark Knight Trilogy will be what he is remembered for in years to come, and I agree they are a fantastic set of superhero movies (I loathe Superhero movies), that will go down in the history of cinema as a series that really transcended a genre and is polls apart from the Marvel money train. However, as always the case when taking on a massive franchise, that even if the movie sucks you are always guaranteed a return from the fans, at the expense of your critical acclaim.
At that point Nolan had nothing to prove, he’d already made Memento, Insomnia, and The Prestige in between Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, he’d earned his stripes. However, as a young director coming off the back of his first feature film, Following (1999), and getting his first shot as a Hollywood director, Memento may have been a risk if the audiences simply didn’t get it. If you told an average audience prior to showing them a brand new movie that the ending will be revealed straight away, you would have a lot of disappointed punters.
‘You don’t want the truth. You make up your own truth.’ – Teddy, Memento (2000)
But that is the brilliance of Memento, it stares in the face of normality and convention, screws it up and throws it straight at you. It forces you to think, to pay attention even, it’s back to front story grinds on you but you stick with it anyway, and do you know what? Not everyone that watches the movie is rewarded, some will go away resenting that they gave the movie the time of day without a clear resolution and will instantly forget it. But for those like me, it’s one that sticks long in the memory and to this day I still don’t know what theory I believe.
FoYoCo 