What is reality without memory ?

Rating: 9/10 (10 July 2001)

This is an absolutely brilliant movie. I'm surprised when people compare with "The sixth sense" and the like, because this is not a gimmick movie. Having read the comments, I think that most people fail to realize why the story is told backwards. It is not to make an otherwise "boring" story more convoluted and hard to follow, but simply to create an impression on how the main character in the movie perceived reality. At the star of every movie snapshot, you have no clue of what has happened before, much in the same way as the main character. It is true that the short term memory loss has been dealt with in other excellent movies like "Wintersleepers", but what makes this movie so brilliant is the combination of this "condition" with the way the story is told. BTW, the fact that Leonard could remember that he had a short-term memory impairment is not a goof - he knew the illness from before his accident, and he had a tatoo in his arm reading "remember Sammy Jankis" to help him remember that. Plus in the final scene we realize that Leonards mental problem was far more complex than it could be have been supposed from the rest of the movie - in this sense there is a "gimmick" in the movie, but only insofar as the whole truth is not revealed until the end (the beginning, that is :-)) I give it a 9 out 10 only because I like to save 10 for later.