The Most Original Movie Of The Year So Far

Rating: 10/10 (17 June 2001)

Memento, for one thing, is a very ORIGINAL movie. It is impressive how the story is told which makes it so original. It is quite astonishing to see such an innovative method of story telling after all these years of movie making. The movie just makes you believe that there is no end of human creativity and imagination.
Story is told backwards from the perspective of the protagonist who cannot remember what happened 30 seconds before due to an incident in which his wife was raped and killed. The story of the movie is his attempts to find his wife's killer. It is very interesting to watch the story going backwards. The director, in my opinion, makes a flawless job of telling the story backwards; it is just ingenious. The success of the movie is mostly based on the screenplay, which is written very cleverly. In each scene, you see what happened before and try to make a connection to what you saw in the previous scene, which, in fact, comes afterwards in real time. As you reach the end of the movie, you come to know the reasons that triggered the events in the beginning, I mean at the end. The most important elements in the story telling are the writings on the protagonist's body, notes at the back of the pictures he takes in order to remember the characters and the little notes he writes on papers. As the movie goes on, you see when and for what reason he took the notes on the back of the pictures and tattooed some of them on his body. The movie also kind of makes you ask the question whether one can rely on the notes he takes as the incidents happen and whether one can rely on these notes' corresponding to the true incidents in reality. Protagonist claims that he can, answering, "yes" to that question but I thought the otherwise.
This is not a easy movie to understand. I am going to rent it when it comes out because there are some things that I didn't understand. In the end, like me, you may find yourself asking whether there was a character named Sammy in reality, who killed his wife, what was his real job or even who was Teddy. But these questions don't take any excitement from the movie. This is a very, very good movie. I strongly believe that this movie deserves at least a couple of Oscar nominations (I know there are probably very good productions to come before the year), including "The Best Original Screenplay", "Best Director" or even "Best Editing".