MovieChat Forums > Memento (2001) Discussion > The best story telling I've ever seen!

The best story telling I've ever seen!


It's incredibly original. I've watched this movie a few times to try to understand it better each time I rewatch it.

I just noticed how it makes us feel the same way Lenny does. For each session, we don't know what happened before, as Lenny also doesn't, and everything seems odd and out of place.

Everything just starts from nothing and each time we see Lenny struggling to figure out what's happening, until the end of the session when we get the clue of what was happening before the previously shown one.

Providing this feeling to the audience is only possible by splitting the movie into blocks of session and presenting these sessions in backward chronological order. The movie wouldn't be this fun and we'd not feel what Lenny is feeling if we weren't as lost as him.

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It’s a very good film but it’s not THAT brilliant and original, I think. The technique of telling the story backwards had been done before.

Enjoyable, though and of Nolan’s films I only (slightly) prefer Insomnia.

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Yeah would love to see Nolan return to this style of movie.

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You have !
He does the "not chronolgical" thing in all his movies

This one was novel and did it perfectly , he should have left it there

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Among the best...Nolan is the master.

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I dunno. It’s a clever concept and it does give you the experience of Leonard’s disorientating condition, but great storytelling makes you care about the characters and on that level Memento is lacking - it’s a common problem with Nolan (except for Interstellar and patches in his other films).

I’m along for the ride with Leonard but I don’t really care what happens, or happened, to him. It’s somewhat fun putting the jigsaw pieces together but it’s more of a taxing cerebral exercise than an emotional one. So it doesn’t qualify as great storytelling for me.

Most of the characters are unsympathetic scumbags, and by the end of the film it turns out our ‘hero’ is the worst of all - a serial killer. It’s a neat trick of Nolan’s to put us in the mind of a psychotic serial killer, and the whole idea of needing a purpose in life is insightful, but because Leonard has a very specific and rare condition it takes away the universality of Nolan’s ‘message’.

I do like the film but I find it overrated, and Nolan makes me laugh with what a humourless autist he is. Dude takes himself way too seriously. Tenet was another example of him going full autist and lacking any emotion, a step back from Interstellar for sure.




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Really? A Seinfeld episode used the same kind of storytelling, so I guess you haven't seen that episode.

In any case, I grant you that the 'reverse time-gimmick' works extremely well for this exact story, because it forces the viewer to experience the memory condition the main character has, so in THAT way, it's absolutely brilliant.

However, if you look at it as just a story (and it IS a bit nonsensical one in any case), and watch everything in chronological order (so there's no more confusing gimmick), the story is actually pretty boring, paper-thin and uninteresting. Seeing everything from beginning to end is actually a VERY mundane experience, and reveals that the gimmick makes it SEEM more interesting than it actually is.

By the way, 'Shutter Island' is basically a poor man's version of this movie, if you think about it (so many weird similarities too, like 'Leonard'..)

Memento is an OK movie with an interesting atmosphere and weird, creepy musics, enormously saved by Joe Pantoliano's amazing charisma (I wanted see more of him after watching this), made funny by the gimmick forcing you to realize how funny some situations are, when you know how things happened, and so on - maybe the best example being 'I don't feel drunk', Leonard going to take a shower right after trying to ambush someone, because he forgot the situation he was in.

So I don't know how this can be the best storytelling you have ever seen, but it IS kind of telling how you are talking about the storytelling instead of the story, sort of admitting that even though you want to praise the movie, the story isn't anything to write home about.

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