Leonard (Guy Pierce) is hot on the trail of the man who murdered and killed his wife. He, too, was injured in the attack, rendering him unable to record any new memories - everything fades after around 10 minutes. Although he remembers everything until he blacked out, including his wife lying dead on the floor, he has formed no new memories since that time. This unusual condition has obviously rendered his search somewhat problematic, and Leonard is forced to rely on scribbled notes, photographs, maps, and tattoos to attempt to piece together his investigation.

In what has been described alternately as a pedantic, pretentious film-school choice and a masterful way to tell a story, the story is told in 10-minute segments, starting at the END and working backwards. Therefore, the audience can piece things together in a way Leonard cannot, and our reality becomes totally different from the main characters'. In fact, one could make the case that Memento is a meditation on the meaning and reliability of memory in and of itself, but I'll leave that one to the scholars.

With its legions of fans, it's a wonder this DVD wasn't released with more extras on it. In fact, there are FOUR different versions of Memento on the world market, and all four DVDs have their strengths and weaknesses. The American NTSC-format Region 1 version, seen here, has an interview and the incredible Memento website on it (which, I should note, adds to the story, but only look at it after you've seen the movie, because it might spoil some things). The Canadian version of the film, also a Region 1 NTSC DVD by Alliance, has no extras but has an option where you can select the film's chapters in chronological order, allowing you to see the movie "backwards" (forwards, really). The French and Belgian version is Region 2 PAL, and lacks all the extras but has an option where you can actually play the film in chronological order, instead of having to go back to the chapter screen 48 times. And, last but not least, the planned UK Region 2 PAL release (slated to hit the streets on January 14, 2002) will have a director's commentary, the "play chronologically" feature, but none of the American version's extras.

This shouldn't surprise people, as Memento was released first in the UK and did significantly better there at the box office than it did here. However, unless you want to import a DVD from Europe - which requires a DVD player configured not only to play Region 2 discs, but one that can translate a PAL signal to an NTSC signal - the American version will be just fine. The picture and sound are great, and the chronological mode is basically, as a friend put it, a gimmick. And, with a movie as good as this, we can live without a commentary.

Guy Pearce, with his smoldering Australian good looks and poofed up dyed blonde hair could have been the perfect neo-noir icon- a smart educated rebel appealing to both indie types and mass audiences. But the film provides him with no edge, when that's clearly what he's screaming for. Leonard, the memory challenged hero of Memento, is simply too nice. "See, I have this condition with my memory..." he says with a semi-eager-to-please puppy dog look in his eyes. And the script has him say this over and over again, sometimes for laughs. Pearce isn't allowed to act a complex character; he's barely even veangeful when his revenge for the death of his wife is what is fueling the movie. The opposite is true for the equally potentially magnetic, Carrie Anne-Moss. She's way too mean. Any amount of decency was abandoned by her character for no reason other than to play out yet another relentlessly gimmicky scene of backwards story telling.

The cinemotography and production values for Memento are also sub-par. The atomsphere for Memento should be dark and smokey with dense, well-lit visuals. Instead, the color scheme is bland and sunny and one scene actually takes place, with no irony, in a Bill Knapps. Bill Knapps! In fact there are only three locales mainly: a bar, a house, and a motel, and each looks like it was shot near a suburban strip mall. I have a suggestion for independent filmmakers- never shoot a movie near Arizona. Ever. The bland and flat cinemotography typical of indies mixed with suburban locales interspersed with a few cacti here and there is about the most depressing combination since Sylvia Plath met an oven.

Despite these stylistic mistakes, Memento's heart is in the wrong place. The characters that are introduced as good who we like and are rooting for for the whole film are actually bad, and the characters that are bad who we hate for almost all of the film turn out to be good. It'd be like the end of Indiana Jones if you found out that the bespectacled Nazi is really the good guy and Indiana is just looking for the arc of the covenant because he has nothing better to do. Of course, Memento isn't even interesting up till the stinkbomb of an end anyway.

footnote: There's so much confusion by fans of this movie as to how to "unlock" the secrets of Memento. Hate to say it folks but this film isn't high-reaching enough to contain anything complex enough that it would confuse. At first the combination of telling a story backwards and a plot about a man with memory problems would lead one to believe that the filmmakers could have paralleled the timeline with Leonard's delayed memory. Disapointingly, Memento's backwards story telling is actually completely irrelevant to Leonard's memory plight and is not an enhancer, but a gimmick. A gimmick!