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Fight Club (1999)

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From Time Out Film Guide

This is not an action movie, but a cerebral comedy - which is to say, an ideas movie. Some of those ideas are startling, provocative, transgressive, even subversive. They're also pretty funny. It goes like this: Norton used to be an upwardly mobile urban professional; now, he's pallid, neurotic and unhappy. Then he bumps into Tyler Durden (Pitt), his apartment blows up, and everything changes. Gaudy and amoral, Tyler's an id kind of guy: living on the edge is the only way he knows to feel alive. Pitt's raw physical grace embodies everything his alter ego has lost touch with; they trade body blows for fun, and you can sense the gain in the pain. Their 'club' draws emasculates from across the city; under Tyler's subtle guidance, the group evolves into an anarchist movement. The film wobbles alarmingly at this point, then rallies for the kind of coup de grâce that sends you reeling. Jim Uhls' cold, clever screenplay, from Chuck Palahniuk's novel, is a millennial mantra of seditious agit prop. Shot in a convulsive, stream-of-unconsciousness style, with disruptive subliminals, freeze frames and fantasy cutaways, the film does everything short of rattling your seat to get a reaction. You can call that irresponsible. Or you can call it the only essential Hollywood film of 1999.

Author: TCh

Time Out Film Guide

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User reviews of this film

Mrs. Jayde Pitt said...

Posted on Nov 18 2008 16:28 Brad pitt is so effin fit in this film. i love him

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mrmustard said...

Posted on Jan 10 2008 17:03 The first half hour of Fight Club is a tar-black satire on the deadening effects of consumerism with generous sideswipes at the emasculation of modern man....but it goes on to do more, much more than that. Fincher's film is more than just about society and the tyranny of Starbucks, Prozac and single servings of homogenised milk. It's about civilisation. Our civilisation and how it was shaped, seared and scarred by the last, most horrific of all centuries. Fight Club treads that line between domesticity and damnation, between Ikea and the Apocalypse. This was our lives up on screen in their very minutiae, yet we sense the tremors of the entire 20th century and the 19th century philosophies that gave birth to it. The late Alexander Walker wrote an infamously caustic review of the film for the Evening Standard upon it's release, viscously damning it as representing a 'paradigm of Nazi Germany'. He was dead right. Within the confines of Fight Club we can divine the flames of Auschwitz, Dresden and Hiroshima and in the final prescient image forsee those of downtown Manhattan in September 2001.

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