By Empire: 4/5 stars
Plot:
Former insurance investigator Leonard has short-term memory loss. He can't remember anything or anyone from only moments before. He knows who he is, and can remember everything up to the attack that killed his wife and left him in this condition but everything else is a haze...
Review:
For once you don't have to worry about giving away the ending, since this story starts there, with protagonist Leonard killing a man, and takes us backwards, scene by scene, to the beginning. Or rather, it's a beginning of a particular sequence of events. Although Harold Pinter did this in Betrayal, this is still something special, imaginative, and challenging, Christopher Nolan's exploration of memory and time toying with narrative and structure.
Reversed scenes overlap slightly so we know where we are, and there is crucial exposition stylishly conveyed, in black-and-white links of Leonard getting his bearings, revising his mementos and recalling the past as the story gathers momentum and takes both chilling and laugh-out-loud turns.
It's based on a short story by Nolan's brother, Jonathan, and the sneaky boys get the audience to enjoy speculating on questions about reality, the workings of the mind, self-awareness, identity and time, all within the context of a compelling murder mystery.
The actors do a great job messing with perceptions, with both Moss' enigmatic femme and Pantoliano's impatient sidekick - new to Leonard every time he encounters them - swinging from friend to foe and back again. Pearce is remarkably good, holding this together with an intent blankness across which flicker bewilderment, frustration, despair and fury.
Just try to remember that everything we think we know about Leonard - perceived from his clothes, his car, his cash, his compulsion, and his moral certainty - is as reliable as everything we think we know about ourselves
Memento's denouement is made inescapable by the fact that it has, of course, already happened. All thrillers thrive on shifting sands, self-contained nowhere worlds where allegiances change, crosses double and nobody is ever who they claim to be. Nolan's simple stroke of genius was to add the old literary trick of an unreliable narrator and thereby kick away the last remaining prop an audience could rely upon. Watchable or not, it is compelling and fascinating.
My review:
This was one of my favourite films as it challenges the conventions of a thriller film where it starts the enigma code of who's going to die and who's the killer, this thriller starts from the end and works it way forward leaving the audience in a guessing game by his actions to how he got there, I had enjoyed the tension of memento the camera movements made me feel as if i am right next to the character, the is also non-linear of his traumatic past (him and his wife were hold as prisoners at there home, this lead to them to being attack leaving the protagonist Leonard head injury) this made me sympathies due to him later getting short term memory loss.
Spy Game.
I found Spy Game, an espionage thriller, really confusing. The introduction of the film showed Brad Pitt (Tom Bishop) in one country, the climax starts off good but it suddenly goes into the credits which made me baffled as to how the film is now set in a new country but it’s not clear why or how we are there.
The Micro elements were poor in some scenes. For example, when Robert Redford () had a flashback of the Vietnam War, it was cut straight to the scene. What should have been created perhaps is a helicopter sound effect while the camera is still on him, until it cuts to the Vietnam scene this non diegetic sound could connote a soon-to- be flashback. Once again the Vietnam War showed little micro elements when it came to the mise-en-scene, but the costume design didn’t fit into the time line or events. Both main actors had only bad hair wigs to indicate their so called “youth” but only made them look much older than the present day. The time line was off since Robert says he met Brad Pitt in the Vietnam War (1968-71) to the present day of 1991 yet a twenty year jump suddenly had high technology and futuristic buildings which came in the mid to late 2000. This poor research cuts the integrity of the film by half.
However some scenes were dragged out leaving me in a bored state. Such as when they were in the conference room; the conversation was unclear. They referred to things that the audience had no idea about; for example “operation side show”?
I have already watched most of this film and I probably won’t want to watch it again; in my eyes this was a big disappointment as I enjoy watching espionage films to me this had made Brad Pitt lose huge amount credibility.
Posts
No Response to "Recent thriller reviews."
Post a Comment