Memento

A movie that keeps you awake and wondering for days. The short-term memory loss was exploited in many movies, but Memento is by far one of the best. Christopher Nolan, also known for directing Inception, The Dark Knight and Batman Begins, exploits the illness of his main character, Leonard Shelby, in a proper way.

The rewind effect of the movie is strange at first and makes you feel like you will never understand the movie as a whole. It's a movie that has no storytelling, for you can't retell it from the beginning to the end, but from the end to the beginning. As the main story line, Leonard Shelby looks for the killer and rapist of his wife, in order to revenge her. In the wake of the events, the movie begins with his revenge, but as the movie progresses, you can actually see that Leonard is only a tool for other people's murders and revenges. He creates a sort of puzzle by taking pictures of the persons he meets and taking notes of their character as he gets to know them. In fact, at the end of the movie, you remain with a big doubt if he really killed the right person.

Guy Pearce is the lead role in this story and he does it right. Everything he does is in his way of thinking the movie. He really perfectly impersonates a short-term memory loss illness person. The way he handles the transition scenes, when he forgets what he talks about, and the desperation he shows when he really need to note something down, it makes you feel pity for the main character.

I liked how Leonard Shelby organizes things in order to find what he seeks. He also creates a perfect puzzle and seems in doubt about his own feelings in his early search. However, he decides to kill the one who raped his wife.

Christopher Nolan has received an Oscar nomination for this movie. He makes the narrative structure of this movie run in reverse with small flashback sequences. The film's events unfold in two separate, alternating narratives, one in color and the other in black and white. The black-and-white sections are told in chronological order and the color sequences are in reverse order. The director induces the audience into the same confusion as the main character. At the same time, medical experts have cited Memento as one of the most realistic and accurate depictions of anterograde amnesia. So, the director did a great job with this movie! Also, he directed Inception, another movie that resemble in genre with the same type of psychological turn of events.

After watching the movie I tried and wanted to see if I had a short-term memory loss; it's hard to see things backwards but it's worth trying, it's like you will have control upon the future.

Watching this movie can get interesting; however, you need to watch it twice to really understand it. Memento really rises itself at the same level of a high budget movie.