Are we helpless before the tyranny of circumstance?

Rating: 10/10 (15 October 2011)

Lenard Shelby is in a hopeless fight against the unalterable past: time runs backwards and counts down, and every moment we see is a moment in the past that Lenard can never escape, the consequences already known to us and the cost already paid, but each scene rises up from the ashes of the previous one, revealing our own flawed perception of what has really happened.
Memento is a murder mystery where the whodunit question is answered in the first scene. But did the victim deserve it? Or did someone trick Lenard Shelby into killing the wrong man? And if so, why?
Because of his 'condition,' Lenard knows he has to watch out for people who want to take advantage of him. Condition is a euphemism for severe brain damage, which left him unable to make new memories. The last thing he does remember is his wife dying in front of him. When he closes his eyes, he sees her dying, and since he can't make new memories, the horror of her death and the pain of his loss is always there, fresh and never fading.
Memento at its heart is a quest for freedom from the prison of personal limitation. Lenard desperately wants to regain control over his reality. He follows clues, writes notes, takes photos, hypothesizes solutions. These things, however, can never compensate for the terrible loss of both the continuity of the present and the connectedness of time itself; he knows neither what year it is now nor how long ago his wife died. But he believes if he can somehow avenge his wife, even with his tremendous limitations, he will regain some part of the self-worth that he lost when his brain became damaged.
Profound, unique, and beautiful in its achievement -- Memento isn't a gimmick; it's an elusive puzzle with a clear answer. Is Lenard Shelby a helpless prisoner to past circumstance, or can he still decide his own future?