my $.02

Rating: 9/10 (1 December 2001)

I've only seen this film once, and I think I need to see it a couple more times to really sort things out. But here's my initial impressions.
I'm a sucker for any film which explores memory and how it makes us what we are. (Blade Runner, Groundhog Day and The Usual Suspects come to mind. What, you wonder why I mentioned Groundhog Day? It's a truly great film, and in a sense, it's like Memento inverted. Bill Murray is the only who can remember he's stuck in a time loop; everyone else forgets.) Memento does a particularly good job, since it forces you to remember events in a new way: backwards. It also makes you wonder about who has control of the narrative. Just because we are shown events doesn't mean they actually happened.

For instance (SPOILER ALERT), Teddy tries to convince Lenny that his wife needed insulin injections. We see a flashback of Lenny pressing a syringe into his wife's thigh. But then we see another quick flashback of the same scene, only Lenny is pinching her thigh this time. Lenny is thrown off, calling into question the stability of his long term memory. And we the viewers question which story is "true".
Heady stuff indeed. But that's one of the problems I have with Memento. It's too much like a game using people as pawns. The characters were hard to empathize with, partly because they were so hard to figure out, and partly because there was something inhuman about them. One exception is Sammy's wife, the only person I could truly feel for in the film (but did she even exist?) For a while, I could feel sorry for Lenny's loss of his wife and his memory, but his thuggish behavior and calculated plotting became increasingly psychopathic. I, for one, cannot sympathize with murderers.
So, I highly recommend Memento, but it certainly does not belong on the IMDB Top 10.