Memento

The movie that I chose to review this week was Memento which was written and directed by Christopher Nolan. It is about a man named Leonard, played by Guy Pearce, who has a short-term memory problem and is trying to figure out who murdered his wife. I am always watching those top ten videos on youtube and Memento is always on the lists that are about the best plot twists in movies. So before I had even watched the movie I had already known about the twist ending of how Leonard may have been responsible for his wife’s death. Having known how the movie was going to end I think made me like the movie less than if I had not known. I spent the whole movie knowing that Leonard may have been the person that killed his wife, so I did not get to really experience the twist ending. 

I enjoyed the editing of the film even though it was confusing at times. The film moving backwards made it had to tell what was going on at some points. It also took me a while to realize that different where to show different periods in time. Once I knew that the scenes that were going backwards in color and the scenes going forward in black and white made it easier to be able to tell what was going on. The way that it was edited the film so that the next scene ended when the last one began made it a lot easier to tell where in time they were. When I found out that the movie would be going forward and backward in time and then meet in the middle I thought I would not like that aspect of the film. A couple years ago I watched the movie movie musical The Last Five Years and it had that kind of editing and it made me not like the movie, but in Memento I enjoyed. There was a scene in the movie where when Sammy was at the hospital there was quick shot of Leonard instead of Sam which somewhat reveals that Leonard was Sammy the whole time. That was one of my favorite moments in the film, because I thought it was a clever way to let the audience that there may be something else going on besides Leonard trying to find his wife’s killer. Another piece of editing that they did was when the time times meet I did not notice that it had changed from black and white to color.

Overall I thought the movie was really good and would  recommend that people watch it whether they have seen it or not. They can either experience it for the first time or be able to notice details that they did not see the first time. I would definitely see Memento a second time to try and catch anything I missed.