Christopher Nolan - Memento

12T1 media thriller unit – review writing.

Christopher Nolan was born in London in 1970. He started making films at the age of seven and has been making films ever since then. He has directed a number of famous films including Memento, Inception and The Dark Knight. In most of his films he uses men with a goal who face adversity as the main characters. Another trend in Christopher’s work is that he quite often starts the films with a flashback scene or a scene from the end of the films, in the case of Memento he starts with a scene from the end of the film.

Memento is a film that follows an ex insurance investigator who suffers from short term memory loss but uses photographs and tattoos on his body to remember clues in his investigation to find out who murdered his wife. In this film Christopher has started with a scene from the end of the film and the film goes backwards to show all of the events that have happened.

The opening sequence introduced the thriller genre by leaving the audience with lots of unanswered questions. Other reasons that prove that this film is a thriller is how it’s based on crime and the micro elements add to this. For example, in the opening sequence you see a photograph of a dead man, which is fading away. This makes the audience think that the photograph is important and they want to find out more about the dead man and why the photograph disappeared.

The last scene contains thriller conventions because there is a very panicky atmosphere. The music in the background speeds up and the cut become quicker and more frequent. The micro elements add to this making it look like a thriller even more because of props such as guns and bullets and the man’s blood stained clothes.

Another scene that gives evidence to support the genre of this film is when Natalie walks in with blood on her face. This makes the audience panic and therefore the background music speeds up, the cuts become quicker and the camera angles are closer because in doing this it creates tension and makes the audience want to find out what’s going on. 

In my opinion, I liked this film but I think I would need to watch it again to understand because I am unsure about what happened in some parts. I think it’s very clever how Christopher has produced this film because it draws the audience in and catches their attention. I though that the film was quite slow at some parts towards the beginning and it was quite confusing as to what order the scenes went in. However I would recommend this to other people because it’s different and make you really think about the story line. Although I was confused at some points and unsure of what the main character had already done and what he hadn’t, I liked how Christopher has created a film with such a different feel to it.

By Victoria Pryor