Artistically audacious, brilliant craftsmanship and visually surreal _ also one of the most dangerous and spiritually ambiguous films ever made

Rating: 5/10 (13 June 2008)

What can I say about Fight Club? Technically it is one of the most well-crafted movies ever made with brilliant direction, superb acting, bravura cinematography and terrific editing. Music by the Dust Brothers maintains the overall surreal ambiance of the passages to which they are set (see the scoring of the segment where the Fight Clubbers try to pick fights with innocent people for a good example) and the writing and characterization are far more insightful than the average shocker. Every character is developed well enough for us to either identify with them or at least understand them. There is a lot of unusually ingenious creativity evident in certain scenes such as the IKEA catalog scene, the opening zoom through a brain sequence, the support group scenes, the use of a subjective voice over and non linear chronology.
That's where the pluses end. Now for the minuses. The movie depicts men in their 20s and 30s who regain their masculinity by beating up/getting beaten up by other men. Once they regain their masculinity, they rebel against society by destroying the capitalistic /consumeristic society that has enslaved them for so long. That entails carrying out destructive and loathsome acts of vandalism against society. If you want to re attain your masculinity even if it means killing yourself, then go hurt yourself. Why terrorize innocent people in society who don't share your concerns and probably wont feel the same way you do? Splicing porn stills into children's films and spiking food with bodily fluids might seem downright funny to some, but it is simply vile, repellent and morally repugnant. Some people will even find making soap out of human fat positively revolting. Yet the cleverness with which all this is lensed will make some people want to imitate some of these pranks.
Many of the dangerous ideas may actually sound deep and thought-provoking but some of them are just inversions of the Truth. For instance, all true Christians know that our corporate, materialistic world sells us a lie when it says we need our favorite McDonald meal to be happy or we aren't somebody if we don't have a good bank balance or the latest car. Fight Club knows this truth and perverts it. It also perverts the beautiful ideal of masculinity suggesting that if you do not have scars or injuries from dangerous beatings, you are not man enough. At least movies like Die Hard and the LOTR series celebrated masculinity in the proper moral context, with the protagonists flexing their muscles to protect and defend innocent people.
An argument could be successfully constructed that this movie doesn't glorify its violence and nihilism rather it is a deconstruction of it as evidenced by the hero's futile attempts near the end to stop the mass destruction from taking place. The subtlety of the movie's last-act rebuttal to its anarchistic themes completely escaped me as I felt that this movie was nothing more than an apologetic for its one evil character's nihilistic philosophies.
The eerily prescient image of the credit card buildings collapsing serves as a tight ruler slap to the wrists of all those who cheered during the destruction scenes of Independence Day and Armageddon. I never cheered during all those pyrotechnics so clearly I am not among the members of the audience this sharp satirical barb is aimed at.
I am looking for the movie or movies that correctly satirize capitalism, materialism and the feminization of masculinity in developed societies, but Fight Club is not that film. I still remember finishing the screening of this film, feeling equal parts amazed and horrified. Amazed to see so much creativity in one single film and horrified at the possible real-world implications of what I had just seen.
My rating:***** out of **********.
Artistic Value:***** out of *****. Moral/Spiritual Value: 0 out of *****.