src
The creative team over at Screen Junkies is back to have us laughing once again with another Honest Trailer: this time for Christopher Nolan’s acclaimed thriller Memento. And like Memento, the Honest Trailer is presented in reverse. Before Nolan was a household name that commanded a sizable box office draw, he wrote and directed this postmodern, backward narrative that has since gone on to become a modern classic and is even slated for a remake.
Memento is the story of Leonard (Guy Pearce), a man who suffers from a rare and untreatable case of memory loss, as he struggles to find his wife’s killer. Inspired by the protagonist’s disease, the narrative itself is told in segments that occur in reverse chronological order. In other words, the film presents the conclusion first and later goes on to explain the events as the story unfolds.
Honest Trailers is now famous for its comical critiques of popular movies – i.e. Titanic, The Avengers, and famously Deadpool in which Ryan Reynolds himself made a brief cameo – pointing out obvious and not-so-obvious flaws in filmmaking and storytelling. The channel pokes fun at all types of movies, from Forrest Gump to Transformers. However, this is not the first time the team decided to use a Christopher Nolan picture, as Honest Trailers for Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, The Dark Knight Rises, Inception, and Interstellar are also fairly popular.
In a behind-the-scenes feature on the Screen Junkies YouTube channel, the creators behind the video have admitted that this particular entry into the Honest Trailer library is one of the most revealing in relation to their creative process and the formula behind their comical analysis. For those less familiar with the Screen Junkies’ work, there is generally a formula to Honest Trailers that fans have become accustomed to. This most recent Honest Trailer really breaks down that formula by presenting each of its respective segments in reverse chronological order: the title card, the film’s actors, a humorously simplistic plot synopsis, teases directed at the director or the studio, various social media comments, etc.
As sort of a meta play on Memento‘s narrative structure, this most recent Honest Trailer is one of Screen Junkies’ smartest and arguably one of their funniest videos to date. By inserting a few jabs at Christopher Nolan, his fans, and even a clip of the Dana Carvey-led movie with a somewhat similar premise Clean Slate, the Memento Honest Trailer truly works on several levels.
