This film can be very confusing once first watched however it is quite clever how they made it. Basically it is split up into two different parts, one in a black and white showing events and then the colour parts of the movie are showing the parts leading up to the event. It shows it in a way of how the main character Leonard sees things and his confusion of what actually is going on. It’s based around how Leonard and his wife were attacked. His wife was raped and killed and he was knocked out unconscious causing him to have amnesia. Leonard believes there was a second attacker when the incident happened named John G, in which he sets out find and kill as the police don’t believe that.
How it happens is that Leonard kills the guy named John .G in the beginning part of the movie, but it tells a story throughout of Leonards confusion. Leonard in order to remember anything must write down, take a photo or even tattoo things onto his body to remember what everything is and who everyone is. He meets a woman called Natalie who her boyfriend is Jimmy Grantz (or John G) who doesn’t treat her right at all. She understands his condition and helps him by giving Leonard the license plate number so Leonard can get tattooed on himself as he remembers this is one of the things he had written down and what he’s looking for. Up to this point I was very confused as to what was going on, I basically understood that Leonard is looking for this man to kill but I wasn’t sure how it was going to happen, however there was another character named Teddy who claims to be helping Leonard in his investigation to track down John G but in the end Teddy just basically tell Leonard that Jimmy is the John G he is looking for in an attempt to end this never ending search for the real attacker.
Leonard doesn’t trust Teddy however, but then Teddy starts to tell how Leonard is confusing his life with a guy called Sammy who also amnesia and how Sammy’s wife tried to help him by continually asking him for her daily injections which caused her to die, when in actual fact it was Leonards wife that died from overdose and not Sammy’s wife cause Sammy was a con artist? (Very confusing!)
In the end Leonard takes down Teddy’s licence plate number just the way he did with Jimmy and killed him. Leonard burns the photo of Jimmy’s body after realising it’s not the real John G and after all that we realise that actually Leonard had already killed the real John G over a year ago, but I guess he just couldn’t remember. It took a while for me to get my head around it but that’s pretty much how the story goes, in the end I kind of felt slightly disappointed by how we went through all that to find out that he’s already killed the real guy he’s after, but it was a really good movie. It built up bit by bit from the attack and through the process of what the amnesia has done to Leonard by him constantly trying to remember everything and that it’s set up a never ending quest to find John G because he simply can’t remember killing him and that his wife actually survived the attack but he gets confused between what happened with his own wife and Sammy’s wife and how he’s confused between his own amnesia and Sammy’s amnesia (or something like that) having met Sammy before the attack. I think it’s one of them films where you have to watch it about 20 times before you actually get it or if you read up about it, it can become a bit clearer. You can see why it is a good film and they way they showed it coming from Leonards perspective was good so it’s as your putting yourself in his position with the transitions between black and white and colour showing you what happens at the end of the movie at the beginning. It build up a suspense of what’s going to happen next and what Leonard tries to work out in order to get the man he wants to kill.
I think I’d have to watch it again to understand it a bit better because it makes you want to write everything that happens down just like Leonard in order to know who, what, when, where, why and how cause it can make you as confused as he is to be honest.
No comments:
Post a Comment