Mediocrity Gone Mad! Yet another cynical and senseless byproduct of this wonderful era of cinema.

Rating: 4/10 (3 June 2005)

*Tiny unspoilers within*
No, it's not a dig aimed at the formerly great MGM, I talk of Memento. Intelligent film making? Perhaps. An intelligent film? I think not! In this post Tarantino age of cinema this is what passes for a masterpiece, god help us! It was Tarantino's Pulp Fiction that sparked this brave new age of cinema we are currently suffering, the age of mediocre is the new good. It is so fitting that the so called benchmark for film making in the 21st century should be the personification of style over substance. In fact there is hardly anything worth extracting from this self congratulatory thriller other than the over stylized imagery and technical wizardry on show. This film is stone cold, a lifeless film made purely for your aesthetic pleasure.
The premise for the film IS intriguing, the director provided himself remarkable scope in which to create a fantastically gripping thriller by virtue of the protagonist's 'condition' combined with a muddled take on the old reverse narrative. This allowed him the chance to chop up the plot and deliver the punch line from each segment first then show us the events leading up to that point. This is fascinating the first couple of times, but by the 4th I was thinking "wow, that's getting old fast" by the 8th time I just wanted the punishment to stop. The narrative device is purely and simply a clever gimmick, and one that is clearly wasted on such a banal story. The argument has been used that the connect the dots narrative structure is the only thing that makes it intriguing. Heck, so what? It is possible to take a half decent plot and spin gold from straw with the right narrative structure. Not here though, even told in reverse it had no worth in my eyes because the plot is beyond redemption. A thriller should be thrilling, this film is snail paced and instead of being intriguing the narrative structure quickly begins to resemble someone desperately trying to draw blood from a stone, futile. Further more a thriller or drama should have interesting characters and a bit of intrigue. The plot was not captivating, the situation was not captivating, the characters were not captivating and I did not care about them, especially not Lenny and his questionable motives.
There is not one good character in this film, not surprising since the actors don't have any challenging dialog to work with. Also they look like they were sleepwalking through filming, only Pantoliano attempts to bring anything resembling life to this turkey. I can almost forgive Pearce as he is playing a vengeful, obsessive psycho, and he has no short term memory so he might well have zero personality or emotion for good reason. However Moss' character is simply a horrible film noir clichÃ©, the femme fetale, and she performs the role with no style whatsoever, perhaps because she has little work with. All she is required to do is look moody and menacing and be a bitch. Please, can nobody come up with good characters these days? The effect is not good at all, I felt these characters and the swiss cheese style excuse for a thriller/drama were spat out as the appendix for a Nolan master class in technical magic and whiz bang editing. The cast are rendered pointless by a senseless plot that only exists to be manipulated and rearranged to display the fact you can take a terrible story, mix it up beyond recognition and somehow disguise it as some sort of epiphany, a la Pulp Fiction.
Then the ending (sorry beginning?) was just the icing on this grotesquely elaborate cake, I don't want to totally spoil it for those who have not seen it as the surprise of having your head deflated in disappointment is one not to be spoiled. It's suffice to say the preceding events were rendered even more senseless by the anticlimactic conclusion, I had not seen an ending this whiffy since Fight Club (later bettered by Mulholland Drive). I was left apathetic and cold by the conclusion to this 'riddle' that seemingly offered two possibilities, neither of which would validate the rest of the miserable excuse for a film. Why? Because I didn't care! Memento (and it's message) is like ouroboros in the most literal sense - circular, self contained, endless and ultimately pointless. Forgive my apparent artistic blindness, I DO appreciate creativity and inventiveness, my message to Mr Nolan and his peers would be "please use it to INVENT a decent story!"
In reflection, perhaps the most annoying thing isn't that Memento is so mediocre in every way, it's the fact that it has been so widely regarded as a great film, much like the two putrid films that it rooted from - Fight Club and Pulp Fiction. I don't know, my friends say I am a cynic and the harshest of harsh critics, well I simply say I am just reflecting on a harsh and cynical world that thrives on misery and depression like they are going out of fashion. With the rapid development of special effects, filming equipment and creativity in cinema it's easy to look back on the 'golden eras' of cinema and chuckle at the technical integrity and naive world view of some of the oldies. However it almost makes me want to shed a tear that cinema has come such a long way technically but sadly seems to have lost the values that used to be at it's heart. Films used to tell stories, they used to have REAL characters and had soul and substance. Now I look at the 'classics' of todays material world - films like Pulp Fiction, Memento, American Beauty and Fight Club and I see nothing but hate, cynicism, sharp emotionless dialog, 2 dimensional characters and most importantly style over everything else, a sad but accurate reflection of the age we live in? Indeed.