Too much effort toward complexity but a great story

Rating: 7/10 (2 June 2012)

It was my second time ever;viewing Christopher Nolan's thriller "Memento".Memento is about Leonard Gray, a San Fransisco resident that is left with brain damage after receiving a hard blow to the head from a frightened home invader.His brain damage gives him a disorder called short term memory loss and changes his life forever.Memento recounts the chilling events that follow Leonard's misfortune.
Leonard is a former insurance adjuster with a diabetic wife;who commits suicide by repeatedly requesting her insulin dose from a brain damaged Leonard.She dies in a coma, and because Leonard is unable to retain facts unless they're retold to him several times(this method is also known as rote learning),his "recall" is terrible.He's left with a false memory of his wife's death in which he teaches himself by sharing it with pol ice multiple times.After Lenny's brain damage is discovered,one police officer,John G, decides to take advantage of Leonard by moving him out of his home and into a cheap motel room to use him as his personal hit-man.John G easily convinces Leonard that his name is Teddy and he is helping him track down his wife's murderers(what Leon ard believes to be the home invaders that injured him).After catching the actual home invader(who didn't really murder anyone),Leonard seems to forget this event entirely and is afterward tricked into murdering a drug dealer that a female friend of his,Natalie is wary of,along with 2 or 3 more enemies of John G's.Leonard tattoos impor tant markers onto his body and takes polaroids but still constantly forgets everything anyone says or does to him.
The details of the movie signify Lenny's hippocampus' as the problem;as he is obviously unable to encode or con solidate anything that doesn't happen more than once.Parts other than his episodic memory like declaration or proce dural memory seem to be fine.He can clearly retain regular facts,like John G's(Teddy's) face,the location of favorite bars and resturaunts and his own belongings.Ultimately,this bloody tale ends when John G tells Leonard the truth,and in stead of taking quick notes of who his next victim will be,Leonard burns all evidence of the horrible killings and writes himself a note of instruction; to track down and kill John G; and ignore anything John says to him beforehand.
Leonard lets everything that's occurred "go" and moves on with his new life.What he will or won't remember about any of his past without help is unclear at the end of the film. I believe "Memento" portrays short term memory loss very accurately..the screenplay makes it very obvious what the physical and psychological details of Leonard's disorder are.I don't feel it was necessary to edit the story without chronological order.The story is complex and exciting with an intense climax and it's a movie that one would have to pay close attention to even if it was in order from start to finish.It was too much in my opinion,to backtrack any parts of the film that didn't involve story telling(like Lenny's episodic recall of Sammy Jenkins).All of the backtracking caused my viewing experience to be more interactive than I cared for.Because of that,I believe I would've enjoyed
Memento more if it had been edited differently.
Memory is extremely important and regular mental tasks like learning or listening are more delicate and valuable than we all appreciate.For instance,if one were to try to pass up their own mind's encoding system and take notes of everything they saw or heard in one day.they wouldn't do much else!The movie makes that fact even more apparent and illustrates the possible detriment to our lives the inability to perform a simple but priceless mental function ,like encoding and consolidating facts could be.Memento is such a great story that the fabulous acting is almost unnoticeable.That was my second viewing of the film an there will probably be a third.