Great movie that should be seen at least twice

Rating: 10/10 (24 October 2001)

This movie is so complex and well-planned that it actually made my head spin after seeing it twice. It's not the information - it's the way you receive it. Leonard is a man incapable of making new memories due to an injury he sustained in trying to foil the rape and murder of his wife. Christopher Nolan puts you in his head with his rewind editing. You see a scene, but like Leonard you don't know what happened the scene before. So you don't know what is really happening. You don't know who the other characters really are. You have the watch the next scene (i.e. what happened earlier) to piece the film together. It is this format of time that forces your own mind to get a little dizzy trying to keep up.
I say see this twice because it takes that to fully grab the movie. From my own experience, I got the overall gist of it the first time, but I spent so much time trying to piece the movie together that I missed some important, obvious details. It takes a second viewing (once you're not as confused as Leonard is) to catch these details and grasp a more full understanding of it.
The scenes pasted together going backward is the big thing making this movie special. If it were conventional in its use of time, Leonard would be nobody we could relate to. But by going back in time in increments at a time, we experience the movie with an even greater suspense, while getting a firsthand lesson in what it's like to have no short-term memory. It's brilliant enough to come up with this concept to tell the story, but the details within each scenes, and set of scenes, make this an outstanding script and direction by Christopher Nolan. It's as good as advertised - see it.. at least twice!