Memento

All. Of my hate...


Art does not excuse wasting people's time.

Here's a good rule of thumb about audiences, and their relation to characters: they tend to feel what the character is feeling. If they're happy, we're happy.
If they're sad, we're sad. The same can be said for negative emotions. If a sympathetic character is acting annoyed, the audience will be annoyed as well. You don't want the audience to be annoyed, so remove the annoyance, regardless of what you think it is suppose to do (be funny is the most common one... thank SpongeBob for making that main stream).
There is also something that should be avoided at all costs: characters feeling like they've wasted their time, and they actually have (I mean that sitting on their thumbs is equivalent to what they've accomplished). Because it works the same way. If characters waste their time they waste ours.
And Memento is extremely guilty of this. The entire movie turns out to be a waste of time, where our minds are taxed by an unreliable narrator and the guy who made the recent Batman movies. Making your audience think a little is alright, but don't make them put the scenes in the correct order. It is extremely taxing to try and make sense of the film, especially when a new twist is thrown out in every scene that is enough to make M Night Shyamalan say "Woah cool it with the twists!"

*sigh* a well-worded criticism of the Christopher Nolan films is that they require a flowchart to understand them. A flow chart would be very helpful for this movie...

But, what makes me hate this film more than the inane number of twists, waste of time it makes it self be perceived as, or the headache I garnered after watching it... Is the terrible story.
The film is about a man whose wife is dead and he wants revenge. However, he apparently got his revenge a year ago, but he doesn't remember it. Thus a dirty cop is having him kill people with the name John G, and getting money off them. The dirty cop tells the man this, but he doesn't want it to be true, so he decides to let himself forget it, and go after the cop. Except, all that is in the last scene, which is supposed to be the middle. It is at the end that we learn that our hero is a psychopath, who is being used by every person he meets. Oh and there's more, because we don't actually know his past because there are conflicted facts and stories. One of them is where his wife is raped and killed, and he is hunting for the man who got away. The other is that he got the man, and he killed his diabetic wife because she didn't understand the illness. All around, I regret watching it... Art movies, they are painful...


Oh and by the way, the character states quite often that he doesn't have amnesia, he just can't store new memories...
That is Anterograde Amnesia. The traditional amnesia that most people know is Retrograde, as in retroactive, past. He didn't forget his past (one interpretation, the one I prefer, otherwise the movie has been an entire waste of time), but he can't remember past the immediate present. That is still Amnesia. If you're going to be scientific, at least learn what types of Amnesia there actually are. I learned that in just my third week of introduction to psychology, a course required in a ton of ASU majors, so there is very little excuse for a movie trying to be scientific about the disorder not bothering to check if his disorder is actually classified as a type of amnesia.



This has been Fixer Sue, ranting about a movie people in their right mind don't want to watch.