Review of Fight Club (1999) by Diego T — 05 Jul 2013

This review contains spoilers.

If Memento was the greatest cerebral thriller ever, Fight Club it its evil twin. Following a corporate drone's descent into madness, the film stars Ed Norton as the never-named Narrator, who encounters the rough-and-tumble Brad Pitt on a routine business trip. From there, Fight Club never lets up. After a freak turn of events forces Norton to move into Pitt's neo-anarchist home, his life begins to change completely. The pair found The Fight Club, an underground club that fights (hence the name).

As Fight Clubs spread across the nation, Pitt's character takes it to the next level with Project Mayhem. As the story unfolds, Norton discovers that Pitt is merely his hallucination, and that he has imagined him as his other personality after being beat down by corporate America. And it is spellbinding. There is an innate realism in the fact that someone would dream up a Brad Pitt character as their badass alter-ego. And anyone who denies that is lying.

Norton gives the best performance of his I've ever seen, and you can tell that he and Joseph Gordon-Levitt probably have a lot of competition for roles. Pitt is fantastic as always, and essentially reprises the role as his over-the-top psychopath in 12 Monkeys.

People who think that this movie is just about fighting clearly just read the title and said "Oh, it's Fight Club, I have to hate it." But for all its blood and gore, Fight Club is far more cerebral and psychological than most would think. The twistiness of the plot as Norton figures out that he really is Pitt is almost unfathomable. Spoiling it would be a sin, almost on the level of saying "Bruce Willis is dead" to someone about to see The Sixth Sense.

The film will scare you more than any horror movie. It's about blindly following, cognitive dissonance, and most importantly, it's about multiple personality disorder and anarchy. Hard to imagine a film putting all that in one film, but Fight Club does it with stylish direction, amazing visuals, and some of the best dialogue ever written. All around an amazing, amazing film. I cannot recommend it highly enough.