Nolan's Best Film

Rating: Null/10 (12 July 2012)

I always do reviews according to some connection with another film coming out the year I do it. In other words since TDKR is coming out in a week (I got tickets to it in IMAX!), I would like to go through some of Nolan's films. I consider this (and so will many) to be his best.
The Batman films and Inception were brilliant as well but they were made with large budgets. Low budget films tend to be more focused. They use clever filmmaking techniques, a non-ensemble cast, and tend to let the story keep us captivated.
Most of us know the story. It follows a man, Leonard, who can't make new memories, who tries to find his wife's killer using Polaroids and information tattooed to his body.
It's presented in a non-linear format. The events are given to us in reverse order giving us a sense of the Leonard's condition. When the events unfold you truly get to see what his intentions are.
This is what makes it Nolan's most thought provoking film. The thing with Inception and The Dark Knight is that their issues don't have much gravity when they take place within an established fictional universe. Memento is very much grounded in reality. There are people who suffer from anterograde amnesia and the film portrays it very accurately. Ask yourself: If you could not make new memories, if you could only store certain pieces of information about your experiences but not all on some tangible object, how would YOU come to define yourself? What mistakes would you choose to learn from? How would you choose to feel guilty? This was just part of a string of existentialist films that came out during that two year time span from 1998 to 2000 but it's by far Christopher Nolan's magnum opus.