Clever for the sake of being clever
Also, over long pretentious nonsense. That's all.
shareAs far as I'm concerned... it's a decent action blockbuster with a mind-bending theme.
People tend to make way too much of it.
This.
Movie's not even trying to be deep. People choose to put that on it. It's really just a scifi fi heist movie and doesn't pretend to be anything else. All because it has more meat than your average fast movie, you got people exaggerating how deep it is, and then you have contrarians like OP.
The only Nolan films that I would say are arguably artful are Memento and The Dark Knight.
"The only Nolan films that I would say are arguably artful are Memento.."
'Artful'.
Do you not realize ART is a toilet glued to the wall (to prove a point about 'art', but then people took it seriously)?
Do you not realize ART is a blank canvas called 'Untitled' that sold for millions?
Art, pff! What's good about ART? ART SUCKS!
In any case, what's so 'artful' about Memento?
Memento and this movie are basically the same thing: overly-complicated structure that hides the fact that the story is simplistic and dull.
The only thing that makes this movie seem 'mindblowing' to people, is that it's so complicated with the levels and the rules and that makes it hard for the masses to comprehend, so it's automatically 'deep'. Anything their little brains can't handle is 'deep'. Meanwhile, they can't answer a question like 'Name a country that starts with the letter 'U''.
This type of movies have a very simple core story that's BARELY a story, that's then overly-convoluted and complexified (if this is a word) to the MAX. by all kinds of gimmicks, giving it a superficial polish that blinds the audiences to think they saw something remarkable and interesting, when they only saw a COMPLICATED GIMMICK.
Watch Memento in the chronological order, and you will see what I mean - it's a really stupid 'story', that only seems interesting because we're seeing it backwards, and thus can't know what the heck is going on very easily (plus, just like this movie, it contains an enormous amount of filler).
The only good thing about that 'reverse' storytelling (though I think Seinfeld did it first - but even that episode wasn't really funny anyway, no matter which way you watch it) was that instead of being a 100% useless gimmick, it actually sort of serves the story by "putting the audience in Leonard's shoes", by basically forcing the same memory defect to happen to them.
So the viewer experiences things the same way Leonard does. But is it ART?
In any case, if you remove the 'dreamworld levels and rules'-complexity from this movie, the story is pretty dull, predictable and boring.
If you watch Memento in chronological order, you get the same thing; a pretty dull, straightforward story with nothing much interesting about it about a crazy guy making himself kill an innocent (well, semi-innocent anyway) man.
In Leonard's case, it's the stupidest decision he could have made if he wants to keep hunting for his wife's killer(s) - with Teddy alive, he would have an endless amount of 'satisfying hunting life', but with him dead, and his license plate tattooed on his leg, there can never be another John G., Leo will always end up back to a guy he already murdered - and probably another mental hospital or some institution again, without even remembering what he has done.
It's a memorable movie (ok, pun intended), but the story is not that interesting, and I didn't find anything more "artful" (WHATEVER this means) about it than I did from a toilet glued to a wall.