This film had a very interesting structure that makes it very unlike the other movies. All the events that happened are shown to us in the backward order, so to say we see the ending first and then all the other events that led to this ending. The last episode of the film is actually the beginning of the story.
The main character Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce) has lost his memory. Not completely: he knows who he is and that he was in some kind of an accident. He remembers that he has lost his wife. She was murdered. And he wants to take revenge: find his wife's killer and kill him.
The trouble is that weird memory that he has. He remembers what has happened before the incident, but after that he is able to remember things only for a few minutes. So get to different tricks, writing little memos on scraps of paper, photographs and even tattooing them on his body. He takes pictures of the people he met and places he visited. He trusts his intuition and immediately writes his impressions about people, which later help them to decide what to do. His task is not easy and people he meets in their turn are not always willing to help, they use him for their own purposes taking advantage of his condition.
Yet, it would be a mistake to say that you can just watch all the episodes in the reversed order. The film has its own structure and the viewer has to follow it. Besides there is a kind of a parallel story in this film that is related in the right order and it helps to clarify a condition of the main hero. Full colour episodes are changed with black and white fragments, the old trick but still effective.
The film is very dynamic and you watch it eagerly expecting what will happen next. An episode you had just watched in a few minutes suddenly acquires a new sense. You see actions first and then motivations that are different from what you might have thought first. Impulses and calculations are strangely mingled. Add to all this a California reality with its rush, cars, drugs, bars that adds to the general impression, and you see that you've got a solid pack to see. By the end there still might be some obscure moments, it's not all clear at all. The history in fact can go back even further.
The acting is very good too, though the director Christopher Nolan used not very famous actors. Actually, quite often such movies are better without big stars. His other film, Insomnia following Memento fails to make the same strong impact because he just repeated tricks that are totally out of place there. It's not bad in its own way except a very weak script. On the other hand what can you expect from a remake? It does look like a secondary work. Memento is a new approach in cinema.
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