Remembering Memento – 9 reasons why Ghajini is Zilch.
A while back, while Ghajini was still ‘in the making’, I happened to come to know that Ghajini was inspired from Memento, a Chris Nolan film in 2000. Just curious about what it is like – I bit torrented that film and watched it. It was a class movie. It took me a while to watch that movie several times backwards and forwards to end up eventually not understanding it. This film lead me to become a Chris Nolan fan and subsequently I watched most of his movies – “The following”, “Insomnia” and “The Prestige”. Till date “Batman Begins” and “The Dark Knight” remains to be seen. What I am going to write about is not about Chris Nolan and his movies but about the movie I recently saw – “Ghajini”.
Usually if there’s enough hype created about a movie, it ends out becoming a rather mediocre. Somehow I expected Ghajini to break this Jinx, afterall, it was beyond me – how a movie inspired by Memento and which Amir Khan was taking so seriously be thus? Ultimately, the jinx won. Ghajini came out just as expected – Pathetic, Medicore.
Now people will accuse me of comparing it with Memento – I am not doing it at all. I don’t expect this movie and for that matter any movie to come anywhere close to Memento. It is a leage of its own. But I had a notch too many expectations from Aamir Khan, probably after his previous masterpiece ‘ Taare Zameen Par’.
I would not get into details about the story and the plot , but here are the few points where I think Ghajini fails miserably -
1. First there are too many loose ends in a plot. A cop supposedly finding out a killer using a bus ticket fallen somewhere beneath a table is lame at best.
2. A movie of this kind does not need to have so many useless songs.
3. Background score of A R Rehman is below par
4. First time I have seen Aamir Khan not performing half as well as his calibre. Someone suffering from Anterograde Amnesia doesn’t have to scream, behave as if he’s some kind of a caged animal (This is one place, I cannot not compare Aamir with Guy pearce in “Memento”.)
5. There’s virtually no suspense in the movie – The viewer knows within 5 minutes from the beginning of movie who Ghajini is and he’s established well in advance as a Vile character. (As I will depict subsequently, the whole movie can be made without actually showing who Ghajini is?)
6. Ghajini fails to depict the utter helplessness of the lead character Sanjay who suffers from this disease. There are just passing references. ‘TZP’ did an excellent job of catching the psyche of ‘Ishan’ and his teacher. Ghajini scores zilch over here.
7. Finally there’s enough paraphernelia about photographs, maps, enough “Find Him / Kill Him” messages on the mirror and more than necessary “tatoos” on the body of Sanjay, almost to the extent of being obnoxious (and there’s a mysterious ‘Black Cat’ in the house, for a while, I was wondering whether it is an RGV film?), but not a single mention of how he got there? Or how he started in the first place about getting there.
8. Well a house in which someone was murdered, our hero is staying there again – A bit odd IMO. Police didn’t seal it?
9. The fight sequences are absolutely unnecessary.
As a followup to this post, I have written how a movie with roughly the same plot can be made much more effective and palpable. In short I’d soon post a – Rewritten Script of Ghajini.
Me too, became an ardent fan of Christopher Nolan after watching Memento. The whole idea of letting the audience go through a similar experience (not knowing the motives of different characters, not having any idea of what happened before) as the lead (Lenny) – through a reverse screenplay – was sheer genius. I think Chris Nolan achieved something that even Tarentino wasn’t able to achieve in Pulp Fiction. In Memento, the reverse chronological order of screenplay existed because of a reason. While the unordered sequence of Pulp Fiction existed for its own sake. This year, he gave us the BEST EVER super-hero movie (The Dark Night). EVER!
Vishal
January 5, 2009 at 5:01 pm
Memento in my opinion is one of the best movies, if not the best movie I have ever seen. Cinema is a medium and nolan has used this medium rather beautifully, he’s used it pretty well in his another movie “prestige”. But the first time he’s used the so called “non linear” (to an engineer this term sounds a bit odd) narration in his debut movie “following”. Which I believe is Nolan’s second best film after Memento (I have yet not watched some of Nolan’s movies). If you’ve not, I suggest you do watch that movie. A great movie for a 27 year old debutante director.
gabhijit
January 5, 2009 at 5:36 pm
Hey Vishal,
What a lot of people don’t know is that Momento is a copy of an obscure german film with the title Winter in it. It was made in the early nineties. I saw a release of it from a Miramax screener. It was around about the time that Croupier came out. I will look up the name. I am surprised no one else knows about this.
sq
September 3, 2011 at 10:30 pm
I watched Ghajini for about 15 minutes and then left it simply because it was not digestible at all. What hurts me most is that an actor like Amir Khan publicly states that Ghajini is not a Memento copy – I agree with your point that Memento is way above Ghajini in it’s class and concept/idea but the whole theme of Ghajini is ripped off Memento – short term memory, revenge of lover, taking pictures with notes on them, tattoos on body (Memento = my wife was mudered, Ghajini = kalpana was killed) – simply put, Ghajini wasn’t possible without Memento, which unfortunately is being pushed under the carpet by Amir Khan. Still, Memento stands way above any of the wanna be clones.
Kamran
March 4, 2009 at 9:39 pm
I curse that stupid director ghajini that he will never make movies again!!!! hahahahaha- joker
kjtankit
August 13, 2011 at 10:40 am
I agree with this post completely. Memento aside, the movie tries to be much more than it is. You’re absolutely right in saying that from the first few minutes of the film, viewers can figure out the rest of this much-too-lengthy story. What disappoints me is that Ghajini was trying to be original. They “adapted” a great idea that could have been used to challenge audiences and really become a piece of art, but in the end, it was a great idea that was not used to its full potential. The action scenes were tacky and unnecessary. Amir Khan was supposed to have short-term memory loss, but it ended up looking like a crazed maniac. The songs were good, but completely unnecessary.
A film like Memento, directed by a soon-to-be living legend, Chris Nolan, succeeds because of its intricacy, its challenge, its subtle hints.
Ghajini, however, fails because it is too straight forward, too obvious, and has too many distractions.
Tazz
August 26, 2011 at 9:11 pm
awesome post!
Navneet Singh
February 3, 2012 at 6:16 am