Making a movie where the action is essentially backwards does not make it a masterpiece by itself, if nothing else is there to help the movie along.
Essentially memento sells the ending in the first minutes, the rest of the movie is one long sequence of flashbacks trying to explain what just happened so the whole movie is essentially one long justification for the ending, A man following notes and pictures he takes to remind himself of who killed his wife to then kill that person.
The acting in the movie is very good, everybody played the roles very well and very believable.
This movie was giving a lot of praise when it came out in 2000. For its 'nonlinear' storytelling, funny that I did not see a movie told in a nonlinear fashion, I saw a movie told in a backward manner in chunks, the same scenes appeared more than once, the second or thought time only to provide more context, this feels a little lazy to me.
This movie suffers from one really big problem, essentially the climax happens in the very early part of the movie, after this all we get are a stare backwards as to why we ended there. This makes a big problem no satisfatory ending, there is no reason why the movie could not continue, or it could have stopped before with just putting in the scene that ended the movie earlier, no real problem.
So the ending, not the climax but the last scene kind of destroyed the movie for me. I had this simple expectation that the movie is actually going to have a conclusion, in the sense that we learn that the guy who died at the beginning actually did it, but it turns out that everything in the movie was essentially a ghost constructed by the hero to keep going. Everything he gets up to in the movie can essentially be explained in 5 minutes. Natalie is the girlfriend of the drug dealer who got killed in the end (chronologically the start) who is then exploiting Leonard to scare of another drug dealer away from coming after her, even though her boyfriend had the money, and now leonard has that money. Funny that she never questions why he is wearing her bfs suit, and why he shows up at the bar in a more serious manner, since he went radio silent just before Leonard shows up. Yeah I don't really like it, it seems honestly like a waste of time.
Rating 3/10
