Movie Review: Memento (2000)
Memento is a movie that was recommended to me by a colleague a long time ago. I finally gave it a watch and I understand why it’s one of his favourite movies. The one aspect I liked the most about it is the storytelling structure, which I’ll discuss in length. But first I’ll talk about small aspects that I don’t like about the movie. And finally I’ll give a recommendation in the style of “if you like X, then you’d like Memento as well!”
The bits that I dislike are not large fundamental things, just small pieces. First, the dialogue can be a bit cheesy or dramatic at times, kind of soap opera like. It fits the mood of the film, but I subjectively don’t gel with it. That being said, it’s not like it stands out like a sore thumb, so it doesn’t ruin the immersion. The other part is the overall plot. We’ll talk about the structure which I love, but I think the plot overall is a bit weak. I think they did a conscious choice sacrificed some character development and story depth for the sake of the more complex (and interesting) structure.
The structure is what makes the movie. The “ending” of the story is revealed at the beginning of the movie and then we get to see what happened 5-10 minutes before that, then before that, and so on. This is because the main character himself has a short-term memory problem, so he only has memory of a short span of time. So we are basically watching the movie from his perspective.
If that sounds interesting already, there’s another part to it. The parts that go “backwards” is intertwined with black & white sequences that went forward in time. So there’s a sequence in colour where you get the story from end to start and a B&W sequence that tells another part of the same story but from start to end. The director explained in a video that the colour sequence is meant to be from the MC’s subjective point of view and the B&W sequence is from an objective point of view of us
This creates an uneasiness feeling while watching it. As the audience you feel like you are always playing catch up — “wait, how did that happen” “ah I get it now… wait but how about that other thing” and so on. That translates to an engaging movie. The chronological ending is shown to you immediately at the start and the movie ending is the middle part chronologically that literally ties things together.
On the other hand, because of the unusual structure of the movie, I found that I needed to watch explanation YouTube videos to get the “full understanding” of it. This might just be a me problem. I personally don’t mind doing this, in fact I find it quite fun. But I can understand if people want the experience to be better self-contained, meaning that just watching the movie once would get them the “full understanding”.
So, who do I recommend this to? People who like unusual or unique story structures. A modern equivalent would be Tenet, which is also by Chirstopher Nolan. If the name sounds familiar, he also makes Inception. I think if you like one of his movies, you’d probably at least enjoy the others. I think that thriller movie fans would like it too, especially ones that don’t like jump scares (me!) but enjoys the psychological tension that characters go through in thriller movies.
