Memento (2000)

Director Christopher Nolan likes to do tricky things with time and narrative, but often risks losing narrative cohesion in the process (see also Inception and Dunkirk). Memento is probably his best film and it’s even more tricksy than usual.

Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce) is an insurance investigator who suffers from anterograde amnesia – that is, he has no short-term memory. It was lost in an attack that, he believes, also saw his wife raped and murdered. Despite his memory disorder, Shelby seeks to investigate the incident and take vengeance. In order to remember what he learns each day, he writes things down on polaroids and scraps of paper – and even tattoos messages onto his own body – before he can forget it all again. (As someone with a bad memory who obsessively documents things to compensate, I could relate to this a little too well.)

To make this plot even more unusual, the film’s scenes are shown in reverse. Following each episode, we see the episode that preceded it, and so on. Meanwhile, intercut black and white scenes run in standard chronology.

This could have been a horrible confusing mess from the outset, but Nolan handles it skilfully enough that it works as a detective thriller. It is a mind-bender, though, and you may feel yourself getting lost as the plots progress and eventually converge. I think that’s partly intentional, in order that we feel some of the confusion that plagues the protagonist.

Guy Pearce is superb in the main role. You never doubt his condition, even you do wonder how he remembers – every time he awakes – that he’s supposed to be seeking a killer.

Carrie-Anne Moss and Joe Pantoliano are suitably ambiguous in the supporting roles. The film encourages us to distrust them, but then it suggests we should distrust everything and everyone we think we know. The storytelling itself is deliberately unreliable, and urges us to question what we believe to be the “objective” and “subjective” truths that supposedly make up the reality of our lives.

The Hurt Locker (2008)

Jeremy Renner stars in an extremely suspenseful tale of bomb disposal set during the Iraq War in 2004. Unlike his predecessor, he recklessly ignores the protocols of his role and puts his colleagues in even greater danger. But he appears to be a genius at his work, functioning under the most intense pressures imaginable.

I like the way the film features a couple of big-name stars (Guy Pearce and Ralph Fiennes), only for them to be quickly done away with. I certainly wasn’t expecting that.

Anthony Mackie and Brian Geraghty are both excellent as the other parts of the bomb-disposal unit. Seeing their fear and panic close-up adds to the hair-raising spectacle.

As the film unfolds it increasingly takes on deeper, more profound questions about life and death. Perhaps wisely, director Kathryn Bigelow refrains from passing moral judgements and lets the actions speak for themselves. That said, there’s an inevitable US bias to the storytelling.

An incredibly gripping film that won’t easily be forgotten.

Prometheus (2012)


Ridley Scott’s prequel to his Alien series is a philosophical sci-fi/horror hybrid. It looked beautiful at the cinema – the storm rolling in across an alien landscape was terrifying – but far less so on DVD. My favourite effect is when the investigators throw mapping hover-balls into the alien chambers and the laser/sonar-type scanning technology relays an instant 3D-hologram model of the caves back to the computers aboard the spaceship. Impressive. Plus, the hi-tech “self-surgery” scene is pretty harrowing.

There are some slightly baffling plot elements – why did old man Weyland of the Weyland Corporation have to hide on the mission he himself funded? – possibly to be clarified in subsequent instalments of the series. The film asks some Big Questions. Who are we? Why are we here? What is life? Is a creator the same thing as a god? Can we explain ourselves with science or do we still need religion?

Noomi Rapace and Michael Fassbender are tremendous in the lead roles. It’s a nice touch that the latter’s character models himself on Peter O'Toole in Lawrence of Arabia, which he watches while acting as caretaker on the long voyage of the Prometheus.

Guy Pearce is much less convincing as a decrepit old man. Why not simply use an elderly actor? The worst aspect is the bit-part characters, crew members Millburn and Fifield, who are so badly drawn and one-dimensional that you know from the very beginning they will have to meet a horrible, untimely death. This is a weakness of so many films that you would have thought Ridley Scott would have been able to avoid such a standard pitfall. Imagine how much more powerful the story would be if those minor characters convinced you they were real enough to make you care.

Another thing that simply doesn’t work is the lack of precaution the scientists take. They remove their helmets while investigating alien lifeforms, gleefully unconcerned that they may be exposing themselves to something very nasty indeed. Maybe that adds drama but it also makes the plot less convincing, and anything that makes you question the credibility of what you are watching erodes some of the magic.

And finally, maybe I missed something, but if the aliens seeded life on Earth in the first place (as the archaeologists’ discovery of cave paintings seemed to suggest), why did they want to return with their sticky black goo as a toxic weapon? Or will that all be explained in Alien Covenant?

Overall, it’s engaging without being satisfying.

The King’s Speech (2010)

King George VI (Colin Firth) has a crippling stammer. Lionel Logue, an Australian speech therapist (Geoffrey Rush), tries to help him overcome it. The film studies their complex, evolving relationship against the ticking time bomb that is Britain's impending declaration of war on Germany in 1939. Helena Bonham Carter is subtle and witty as the king’s wife (later to be known as the Queen Mother). Guy Pearce is also strong as Edward VIII, who abdicated to marry divorcee Wallis Simpson.