Great movie for the mediocre intellects.

Rating: 1/10 (27 October 2004)

Bad movie for the rest of us.
Dumb people are just going to say, "huh?"
Intelligent people are just going to roll their eyes at the stupidity.
Besides the "how can he remember that he can't remember" flaw, which makes a roll of toilet paper out of the whole movie all by itself, you have the obvious plot twists.
Everything is so predictable. It's a twisty movie, so you're looking for, and seeing, the twists. Natalie has bruises on her face when we first meet her? She's going to be hit. Lenny has scratches on his face? He's going to get his face scratched. Teddy starts to get in the old car, not the Jag, but Lenny says the Jag is his car, and Teddy laughs and says fine? We know the Jag's not Lenny's car, and we're just waiting to see how he got it. Teddy says roll up the window, and Lenny can't because it's been shot or busted out? We're just waiting for the shoot-out-the-window scene we know is coming. And on and on and on.
And is there anyone, even one person with a triple-digit IQ, who didn't know, upon first hearing that Natalie is helping Lenny out of pity, he thinks, that she's using him? Even one person? IT'S A TWISTY MOVIE! That means that everything you have to believe to keep the movie obvious, can't be allowed to be true, so you know right away that she must be using him.
The worst thing about the movie: the "it's all been *beep* ending. Once you put in a movie anything that says "it's all been *beep* then the whole movie becomes *beep*
How do we know the opening scene isn't a dream? Or any other scene? Because if the narrator is/may be lying/misrembering any scene (as he obviously is re his wife's death) then the whole movie becomes suspect. There's nothing left to chew on. After the very core of the movie--his wife's supposed murder--is exposed as possibly untrue, then what are you left with? Everything he's telling you/showing you might be untrue, might be misrembered or a lie. The opening scene might, if the writer later needs to, be untrue. I can see the Nolan brothers, when confronted with any logical flaws, saying, "well, see, uh, that part, uh, that didn't actually happen, and you were supposed to figure out that Lenny didn't really kill Teddy, who, if it leads to further logical flaws, didn't exist. Uh, duh, uh, I think."
The absolute first golden rule of movie-making must be: you can not ever say or show that anything we've been shown as movie factual (as opposed to character factual, that is, a character's opinion, or interpretation, as in Usual Suspects), isn't what actually happened. We can be lead to or jump to wrong conclusions that are our own fault (more intelligent twists). But the movie itself can't be allowed to lie to us.
Think of how easy it would be to be "twisty" (that is, mentally challenging to the average IQ crowd), if you just show X killing Y, and Z investigating, and at the end reveal that the director was just kidding, Q shot Y. It's just stupid, poor writing.
And in Memento, a movie told from Lenny's POV, if we're to believe anything, we have to believe that he remembers everything until his wife's murder. So once we see him with tattoos, with her, the whole movie becomes a joke. An idiocy. And it is scary that so few people posting here can't see that.