The Movie: The themes of memory, grief and vengeance converge in the story of Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce), a man afflicted with a rare short-term memory loss disorder which means that he is unable to store new memories and is forced to use a system of Polaroids, notes and tattoos as he attempts to build up the clues which will help him track down the murderer of his wife. What Makes It Original: Playing around with the chronology of events in a film might well have been done before (flashbacks and flashforwards are great ways to build tension and drip-feed information to the audience), but director Christopher Nolan's use of two separate timelines - one in colour in which the scenes are ordered in reverse, another in black and white which plays out in order, interspersed with the colour scenes - marks Memento as a truly innovative take on both narrative structure and noir conventions. That this approach mimics the anterograde amnesia Shelby suffers from only adds to its power, the editing style drawing the viewer into his condition.
