Christopher Nolan released his breakout movie 25 years ago today, and it remains one of his most iconic and groundbreaking releases. Nolan actually started his career in 1998 with the twisty mystery thriller Following. That movie played completely out of order, playing out like a puzzle with the pieces falling into place.
However, Nolan’s next movie arrived on March 16, 2001, and Nolan once again played with time in this movie. Unlike Following, which had the scenes jumbled and out of order, Memento played backwards. The first scene of the movie was the last scene of the story, and it played in reverse order, with the mystery solved at the end.
Christopher Nolan Released Memento 25 Years Ago
On March 16, 2001, Christopher Nolan released his second movie, Memento. Guy Pearce starred as Leonard, a man who has anterograde amnesia, which means he cannot retain recent memories. He suffered this affliction after his wife’s murder, and he has spent his life since then trying to figure out who killed her.
Carrie-Anne Moss and Joe Pantoliano round out the cast as Natalie, a bartender, and Teddy, a man who has some connection to Leonard’s past. The plot has Leonard taking Polaroid photos and tattooing evidence on his body so he has it there when he wakes up the next day with no memories.
This allows the twisting and turning story to flow in reverse order to the film’s beginning, which shows what really caused Leonard’s life and how Teddy plays into this. The movie, thanks to its unique storytelling device, was a small box office success, making $401 million on a $9 million budget.
Critics also praised Memento, awarding it a 93% Rotten Tomatoes rating. The reviews praised not only Nolan’s deft hand at directing this spiraling story but also the entire feeling of dread that flowed from the start to the end. It was a perfect example of why Nolan would soon become Hollywood’s most successful filmmaker.
Nolan’s Movie Rewrote The Playbook For Film Noir Dramas
Christopher Nolan made some interesting creative decisions with Memento, as he shot the entire movie in black and white, and the story played out like classic film noir movies. Natalie was the femme fatale, Teddy was the dishonest ally who betrayed Leonard for his own reasons, and Leonard was a normal man swept into a life of danger with no control over his fate.
When film noir was at the height of its popularity, several masterpieces arrived in the 1940s that took viewers into the depths of crime and deceit. Memento easily calls back memories of classics such as The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity, and Detour.
However, Nolan brings something different into the picture, specifically with the idea of anterograde amnesia and the creative decision to have the viewers as confused as Leonard with how the story plays out. This has the femme fatale from movies like Double Indemnity and the dark turns of Detour, and Leonard is a pitch-perfect noir protagonist.
By the end of the Memento, when Leonard understands what happened and makes the fateful decision to become practical with his revenge, it takes an even darker turn. This isn’t a neo-noir like Chinatown, which sees a good man in a dangerous situation. By the end of this movie, Leonard is just as dark and deadly as any noir villain.
While most people talk about the structure Nolan used and his skillful playing with time, the noir aspects are often overlooked. When the film shows what really happened to Leonard’s wife, viewers won’t believe it because Teddy is a brilliantly untrustworthy noir construct. It forces multiple viewings to decipher the climax.
By the end of the year, Memento ended up on several Best-Of lists for 2001, including ranking as one of the Top 10 Films of the Year for both the National Board of Review and the American Film Institute. It earned two Oscar nominations for Best Original Screenplay and Best Film Editing, and it set up Nolan for his future Hollywood success.
Almost All Of Nolan’s Sci-Fi Movies Owe Their Success To Memento
In his first two movies, Christopher Nolan almost seemed more interested in playing with time, even overshadowing his plots. Following was a good movie, but the story took a backseat to making it into a puzzle that viewers had to piece together as things happened out of chronological order. In Memento, he created a great story with his reverse time device.
However, Nolan has since taken the idea of time and created some of the most complex movies ever made, thanks to his unwillingness to adhere to the chronology of his stories. The Prestige was a brilliant movie about rival magicians who harbored a hatred after the death of their friend, and Nolan played with the order of events here masterfully.
However, after his Batman trilogy, Nolan really dived deep into playing with time and chronology in his movies with his sci-fi masterpiece and then later with his most polarizing film. In Inception, Nolan created a heist movie that had a team stealing memories from someone’s mind by going into their memories.
This allowed Nolan not only to play with the fabric of time but also with the entire fabric of reality. Nothing here seemed real, and much of what happened didn’t take place in the real world, with no care about time at all. Even seconds and minutes meant nothing between the real world and the realm of memories.
While that was an Oscar contender, his next big-time travel movie was polarizing and had more detractors than his other films. Tenet had a similar tendency to play with time, and this was about going in reverse to stop things from happening in the past. Even Nolan said he doesn’t completely understand the science here.