Note: I recommend that you see the film ("Momento")before reading this review since I may spoil the fun. This was meant to be an after-viewing discussion.

...Went downstairs and ran into Stephen, Jonathan, and Jolisa going out to a movie. I tagged along and found myself watching an amazing film called "Momento." Stephen talked alot about the film afterwards and drew many interesting conclusions. He interprets things at lightning speeds... accomplishing in a few minutes what would take me a few days of stewing to come up with.

The film ran backwards in time, starting with the last event and going back to the first. Adding to the effect was the quirky main character who had a brain defect causing him to be lacking his short term memory. He could only remember things up to "the incident," which he claimed was the death of his wife who was raped and murdered. He would take photographs of the people he met and put their names on the photos so that he would know that he had met them when he ran into them again. He took a photo of the hotel he was staying at and his car. We the viewer suffer along in his disease since we are going through the film backwards. We, like him, do not know the previous events he has experienced.

Probably the best line in the film from the main character, Leonard: "Memory is unreliable. Only facts are stable. That's why police pay more attention to evidence than they do testimonials." The film then proceeds to question whether "facts" are any more or less reliable than the ability to remember. Characters that we see as sinister end up being victims, and characters that we think are victims end up being sinister. The film really leaves the viewer quite helpless to its powers, and when its all over, you have to question your own ability to gather facts. How much are the facts tainted by what we desire to see take place?

Stephen said that our hopless need for a romantic ending was our downfall as the viewer... we wanted to believe in our main character, Leonard, as doing the right thing. But when the film is all over, we can't trust him, nor can we trust the facts that he had so "carefully" gathered to help him along the way to avenging his wife's death. Stephen said that this film raises the same concerns people have with History and Interpretation of History. Stephen: "We are constantly in a struggle between people who are trying to remember history and people who are trying to forget it." I found it ironic that we had passed the rediculously long line of people waiting for the movie "Pearl Harbor," and we had laughed at them and condemned the film as a poorly put-together piece of propaganda... yet blissfully unaware of the film we were about to see! Stephen said that this could also be applied to science. Should scientists be starting with theories which will hopefully uncover the facts, or start with observed "facts," and then build theories around them? This is why the theory of evolution is so contrary to all scientific theory before it. Can you ever seperate the theory from the facts? Is there such a thing as pure data? When you seperate substance from data, what are you thinking about?

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