Momento Mori is a very unique film which is why I very much enjoyed watching it with my classmates. It is about a young man named Leonard aged around mid 30's who is determined to get revenge on the man who raped and killed his wife and whom also made him lose the one thing people need the most in life which is his memory. As he strives to get revenge on this man, he struggles because of his loss of memory to try and figure out who really caused this destruction in his life. He wakes up every fifteen minutes trying to remember how he had even gotten where he was at that moment. He would kill hundredths of innocent people because of his need of avenges. In the end he never really had gotten his revenge because within those 15 minutes of memory he'd wake up not remembering what he had done. Which lead me to the most important questions; is revenge really worth it or can forgiveness overcome the cruelty of murder? Our human beings capable of moving forward without a memory or can memory have a huge impact on the way a person lives? I think not for both of these questions. Murdering someone close to you brings you to hate the person who had committed the crime but in the end what is done is already done and nobody or anything can change that, so in my opinion it is not a necessity to kill another soul because of revenge. Forgiving is much stronger even though revenge was the only thing Leonard had left in his life. Living without memory isn't living, it is suffering. As much as I learned that Leonard was considered a bad person for all the deaths he had caused, I realized that he wasn't a bad person at all because the loss of his memory had killed him long before he had become a murderer. Which is why I bring myself to my original point... Without memory, there is no such thing as living because we and other surrounding us would never know who we really are.
Personally the story, moral and lesson were very much appreciated and also extremely interesting. It thought us audiences of how revenge isn’t the key to solving a problem because in the end a person will never be satisfied with or without memory loss. It also thought us that memory is one of the most important ingredient in pursuing a great life. Without a memory a human can not move forward because they would never really know who they are. I liked the fact that at the beginning of the film they showed us a photograph symbolizing Leonard's memory. It was very interesting to see how the photograph faded just like how Leonard’s memory had gone by after his and wife's tragic story. I think it was very intelligent to use that at the beginning because it brought the audience attention which is what every director wants. I also loved the fact that director Christopher Nolan used black and white to represent the present and how he used colored scenes to represent the past especially that the movie is already very complicated and mysterious for us audiences to understand he did a great job on using these effects for our better understanding. One of the greatest and most original making of this movie was how Christopher made the movie backwards instead of how it was in the short story, it really made the movie unique and creative.
