Memento Review Writing

Christopher Nolan is a famous British film director, screenwriter and producer. The main genre that he works with is thrillers, and he frequently uses famous actors such as Christian Bale, Michael Caine and Larry Holden. Some of his other work includes thrillers such as Memento, Insomnia, The Prestige and the Batman series. He has previously won many awards including AFI awards and also Critics choice awards.

Memento features the main character, Leonard who has a 15 minute memory loss from an injury in a robbery, as he tries to find who murdered his wife. The storyline starts at the end of the happenings and moves backwards, where key clues are uncovered as the plot  is revealed. In the end, it turns out that his wife didn't die when Leonard "remembers", but however died due to an insulin overdose given to her by him. Teddy plays the role of the investigator trying to find out about how his wife died, and in the end the audience discover that he was just using Leonard for his gain, just like Natalie was to kill a drug dealer that was harassing her.

The opening sequence starts with a polaroid picture of a bloody murder scene, with a close up of a man's hands shaking it to get it to develop. However, gradually, the picture begins to disappear until the polaroid is blank and it becomes evident that the scene is moving backwards. This is important as it hints to the audience that the events unroll backwards. The person who has been murdered is then revealed to be a man, who we later learn is Teddy/ John G. This introduces the thriller genre because the beginning is planned around a murder, which is a convention of a thriller. Also, after the murder scene, it cuts to a hotel room where the non-diegetic voiceover makes it clear the the protagonist Leonard has no idea who he is, or where he is.




A key scene in Memento is the scene where Leonard finds a tattoo explaining not to answer the phone, whilst he is revealing personal information on the phone - clip above. A thriller convention in this clip is that an ordinary situation of answering the telephone is turned into something with tension and suspense when the line goes dead.

Another key scene is when the audience sees the character Sammie, and realises that Sammie is in fact a made up person that Leonard created, to hide the that he infact killed his wife with insulin shots. The conventions in this scene that make it a thriller is the made up identity in order to convince himself later on, when he had forgotten, that he didn't kill his wife.

My opinion on Nolan's "Momento" is that it is a good thriller as it has many of the main conventions, and holds the suspense throughout the film very well, due to the story being told in non-chronological order. However, I think someone watching a thriller for the first time would be put off them for life, as the plot is very confusing and twists a lot, and takes a lot of thinking to work out. I would recommend this thriller, however to an audience that would appreciate having to think to work out the story.