Momento Review - Michael

I had seen the movie Momento a few years ago but had forgotten what the storyline was. Once the movie started in class and the the star walked on the screen, I instantly remembered the plot of the movie. I also remembered that I didn't like it which is odd because I usually like those kind of movies. For some reason, this movie just didn't do it for me. I liked the concept of the movie but I just didn't like the way that they put it together. I think my main problem was that I just didn't care about the characters. That might be because we were just thrown right into the movie without knowing anything about them. Also, right off the bat, we knew that Teddy was killed by Leonard so we knew his demise right from the start. If they left his murder until the end, I might have been shocked. Also, if we were supposed to think that Teddy killed Leonard's wife (who I envisioned differently), it didn't work, I didn't. You knew that there was going to be a surprise ending with someone else killing his wife. That is another problem I had. They tried too hard to have an "M. Night Shyamalan ending" and for me, it was a disappointing. The one thing that I did like about the movie was the use of black and white in the scenes where Leonard was on the phone talking about his experience with Sammy Jenkins and his wife. I thought that their story was really interesting and I cared about those characters. You can imagine my frustration when we learned that that whole storyline was not true. There was no need to spin the story and have that whole plot line really be about Leonard and his wife's experience. There was also too much going on with Natalie, Dodd, etc. If the filmmakers had kept to the basic storyline instead of trying to keep the viewer confused, I think the final product would have turned out much better.