Fight Club

Fight Club; drama / satire, USA, 1999; D: David Fincher, S: Edward Norton, Brad Pitt, Helena Bonham Carter, Meat Loaf, Zach Grenier




The main character is a young lad who suffers from insomnia and visits numerous support groups formed of people who survived a sickness. There he meets the healthy Marla who is also depressive. He also meets the secretive soap seller Tyler Durden who includes him into his anarchic "Fight Club" that offers men a possibility to fight each other and thus get rid of anxiety of civilisation and consumerism. One day the lad wakes up and Tyler is gone, while all the members just listen to him. He travels through towns until he finds out that Tyler doesn't exist, but is actually just his own split personality. He eradicates him and ends up with Marla, watching his plan still come true, namely the bombs destroying financial city block.

One of the most overrated movies of the 90s, heavy satire "Fight Club" marked director David Fincher's return to his dark, dirty, grey style combined with a vague, but subversive message about one individual rebelling against his society and its rules: the visual style is inventive in many scenes, like the one where the hero walks through the pages of an Ikea catalogue, but the running time is overlong, while many moments are simply too narcissistic, sterile and overblown. The amazing plot twist at the end is brilliant and gives the whole film a new subtext which actually neatly fits in with the previous scenes, while Edward Norton and Brad Pitt both give great performances. There are echoes of satire on consumerism, capitalism and anti-totalitarianism, especially when Tyler says his cynical line: "The media is constantly trying to convince us that we will all become millionaires, actors, rock stars. But we are slowly gaining conscience and getting sick of it!", yet all those messages seem chaotic, as if they were formulated by a mind suffering from some kind of autism. The theme is "male dignity" in the modern, psychologically castrating era, which cannot be expressed in any other way than through violence. It is a provocative, good film with an unusual philosophy about how anarchy can be liberating, yet it cannot hide the fact that at times is seems as if it consists just of aesthetically shot dry events.

Grade:++