Review of Fight Club (1999) by Stevenf — 07 Jan 2013

It's a sense of bewilderment after a film like this that comes around from your belief that what you just saw was completely abysmal, or simply genius. I'm the latter.

This film was right on so many levels, not the soap fetish, not even Meat Loaf with breasts, this culture shock was just so good that it was expert cinema, a mind numbingly painful film to wrap your head around, but somehow makes sense in its own twisted way.

Starring Ed Norton, Brad Pitt, and Helena Bonham Carter, Fight Club centres around Norton's unnamed character, who finds little creativity and interest in his routine white-collat job.

He falls upon Tyler Durden, excellently played by Pitt. Durden is a wonderfully disturbed man, bursting with ideas and philosophical whims that reach out throughout the film. Initial screenings of this to company executives where met with distain. its easy to see why. This is not a film to be viewed lightly, its themes and content will not be met with an enjoyable stance. But that it was makes this film so enjoyable, uniqueness, rarity, symbolism and unconventional.

The fast-paced nature of David Fincher's film maintains the setting and plot line which will exceed nyones expectation of what they may or may not expect from this movie.

Norton is playing an exceptionally different character from his neo-nazi turn a year earlier in American History X, showing id diversity for any role given to him. Pitt excels as the brilliantly clever, funny but shady Tyler Durden. Bonham Carter is well cast as Marla Singer, how these two meeting is of particular interest, first outlining the dark humor within this film which persist throughout.

Yes the film is sometimes muddled, and in several scenes it will have you wandering "whats the point?", but that aside, this film does deserve the 'cult' status it now holds, it is simply displeasing to many due to its differential approach to such a common theme, how to change the world, this film won't do this, but it will certainly turn heads to see what's making all the noise.