I’m genuinely confused how this is going to work as a plot:
Memento, Christopher Nolan’s 2000 breakout thriller, is getting remade…
Memento starred Guy Pearce as a man who is tracking down his wife’s killer but suffers from a unique from of memory loss. The movie told part of its story in reverse order while another storyline was chronological. The two met at the end to devastating effect.
Here’s the problem–modern technology shreds the premise:
[Memento] stars Guy Pierce (his breakout role, if memory serves), and is about a man who is unable to form short-term memories, so he has a system of body tattoos, Polaroid pictures (real ones, not Instragram effects), and notes. At the time, it was a brilliant, suspenseful movie as the story continuously changes as Pierce’s character learns more.
But today, you couldn’t make that movie. With an iPhone, which can record video and audio, take pictures, and act as a note pad, it just wouldn’t be that hard to figure out what has happened.
There’s a whole swath of movies that were amazing and today just don’t work, thanks to new communication technologies. Matt Stoller wrote about what The Great Gatsby would be like today, “It would be a one-page story about a guy who made up a bunch of lies about himself, and then someone ran a credit check.”
Curious to see what they end up doing.
Happy Turkey Day.
Cell phones and, even moreso, smart phones seem to be a major challenge for fiction writers. So many old plots that take place in the 20th century would fall apart if most or all of the characters had working phones on their persons most or all of the time, as real people do today.
I think it’s interesting that Christopher Nolan also directed the most recent Batman trilogy. Cell phones appear in important parts of the plot of The Dark Knight, in particular – the Dent / Rachel dilemma is set up around phone calls, for example.
He’ll keep forgetting where he left the charger. Lazy writing works great!
He’ll keep forgetting to update the OS, or will update it and have it crash.