The Movie: Following is a ultra-low budget movie shot on cheap black and white 16mm film... so how did such a film end up on DVD? Well as the DVD box emphatically states, it's by Christopher Nolan, the same guy who made Memento, a movie which caused a pretty big stir in 2001. When I first put this disc in my player I was worried about two things -- one was that it was going to be just a horrible version of Memento with unnecessary timeline tricks. The other was that it was just going to be plain horrible... like student film horrible. Thankfully, it was neither of these things.

Following is the story of an unemployed writer who has a mostly harmless obsession with following random strangers around. It stops being so harmless when he meets a guy named Cobb, who robs people's homes while looking through their possessions to find out about what kind of people they are... helping them in away, by reminding them about what they had, by taking it away. The main character (who doesn't have a name) gets sucked into some trouble through his association with Cobb, and well, that's when things really start to get interesting.

This movie does skip around the timeline. Unlike Memento, which generally starts at the end and goes to the beginning, Following skips backwards and forwards throughout the film. There were moments when these time shifts really made a strong point in the story and really drove it home, but most of the time, they didn't seem particularly inspired, or necessary. And even though this was a relatively short film, it took quite a while to get going, and didn't really grab my attention until about half way through.

So what's my verdict? Once I got through the whole thing, it did prove to be fairly interesting, but it certainly was no Memento. It might be because it was a little too easy to figure out exactly what was going on... too much was revealed too soon, so the "surprise" at the end wasn't as shocking as it could have been... combine that with a not so great beginning, and well, I rate this movie "average".

The DVD: Following is presented on this DVD in its original 4:3 aspect ratio, in its original black and white. The level of detail on this film is quite a bit lower than it is on most DVD's, but I believe that is mostly due to the original film being shot on 16mm than any shortcomings in the film transfer process. In fact, the transfer was rather sharp, with no dirt or dust visible, and remarkably low grain for a 16mm original. The audio was in Dolby Digital 2.0 stereo and was unexciting, but I wouldn't expect it to be, on such a low budget movie.

The extra DVD content was pretty cool though. Aside from the normal stuff, like theatrical trailers (one for Following and one for Memento), and cast/crew bios, there is a neat, alternate-angle feature where you can switch between watching the movie and seeing pages of the shooting script. There's also director's commentary (which I haven't checked out), and one feature that a lot of people would like to see on a Memento disc: an option to see the movie re-cut in chronological order. I'm not sure if it's a problem with the disc, or my player, but this last feature did cause some short pauses between some scenes when watching this movie in the normal mode. But still, I think it was a neat little thing to throw in.