The movie that “put Christopher Nolan on the map” is now streaming on Netflix and Amazon, with a near-perfect 94% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Thousands of stellar reviews praised the Dark Knight director, with one viewer simply stating it was “the best movie” they had ever seen on the review platform.
Professional critics hailed the psychological thriller as a creative masterpiece that keeps you guessing throughout, marking the beginning of his successful career. Memento follows Leonard Shelby, a man suffering from anterograde amnesia – the inability to form new memories – after a traumatic head injury during the murder of his wife. To navigate his new reality, Leonard relies on a puzzle of Polaroid photos, handwritten notes, and tattoos etched into his skin to help lead him to his wife’s killer.
The film’s standout feature is Nolan’s decision to use two converging timelines, moving forwards in black and white and backwards in colour, to mirror Leonard’s disoriented mind. The perplexing structure allows the audience to experience Leonard’s confusion firsthand, as each scene erases the context of what came before.
As Leonard closes in on what he believes is the truth, the film reveals that memory is unreliable and facts are malleable. On a Reddit forum that discussed Nolan’s best film, the consensus hailed Prestige, Interstellar and Memento among his best above Dark Knight.
One stated: “Yeah Memento and Prestige stand far above all of his other works IMHO (in my humble opinion). They are both transcendant works of art, just amazing films.”
A Rotten Tomatoes professional critic wrote: “If you want to see the beginnings of how Nolan became such a big director, this is one to watch,” while another added “the brain-teasing mystery put Christopher Nolan on the map as a filmmaking force”.
The film is now available to stream on Netflix, Channel 4 and Amazon Prime Video.