Hate me for my thoughts.

Rating: Null/10 (4 December 2004)

**** Spoilers below. *****
Fight Club was condescending, ignorant, corny, phony, and impotent. The movie is like a teenager who took Intro. to Philosophy and Intro. to Psychology, wearing a No Fear t-shirt (and stealing its line) telling us he's a subtle genius.
It paraded itself as having something to say, but Brad Pitt's lines came off like bridge graffiti spray painted by a Generation X'er.
We were treated to many terrifically, spectacularly, phantasmagorically violent or just plain sick scenes, including a face beaten to pulp, human-corpse liquid waste spilled all over "Tyler," chemical burns, self-mutilation, soap made from the fat of dead bodies (so we can laugh when Tyler says "we were selling them their asses back to them") and a close range shot of a failed suicide (in slow motion, so we wouldn't miss it). And all merely to spell out N-I-H-I-L-I-S-M with a broad, paint-by-number brush.
Brad Pitt cuts as authentic a nihilistic prophet as, say, Julie Andrews. Consider the nicely spiked hair the svelte Nautilus figure--where'd he take his anarchy lessons, from Billy Idol and Arnold Schwarzenegger?
Beyond the above faults, it was WILDLY, WILDLY unrealistic. Okay yes, all the major credit card companies are in the same city block and can be blown up by morons wielding soap (make me a bomb out of soap and I'll give up bathing).
I'm sure pubescent adult types who want to pretend they're reckless and hypocritically renounce commercialism will love this movie. "Woah, man, they destroyed industrial art *and* smashed a coffee house, with one move! It was like a GIANT GAME OF POOL, man! Far out!" So cool. So hip.
Worse yet, it tried to be psychological. We're given many clumsy, forced, he/she allusions: man with breasts, a self-help group of emasculated males, female attends same, etc. And then the whole split personality thing--c'mon. It's like The Sixth Sense meets the Adams Family. Other than trying to give us something impressive to really chew on, does any of it work? Consider: Tyler already has a profession (projectionist) when Jack "meets him." When the girl gets mad at Jack, she conveniently alludes to the one brief sexual encounter she had with his half", when all along they've been banging away like wild boars. And finally, Jack beating himself up outside a bar, only to be witnessed by others and have one man ask, "Can I be next?"
Still worse, was it comedy or drama? Most of the scenes weren't funny, and they sure weren't realistic. I couldn't figure out if the director wanted us to laugh or suspend disbelief.
And in the closing scene, it's like the writer didn't know how to end it (while we wait out the longest 'real-time' 60 seconds in movie history), and so he tries to kill off his character but fails, and only half of him goes away. Is this an effective cure for multiple personality disorders? Are there nerves in the left side of the mouth and neck that, once injured, lead to the shedding of other personalities? If Tyler didn't get his existence canceled by getting the crap beat out of him, burning his hand, rolling his car, and falling down stairs--I doubt a bullet hole will eradicate him instantly. On the film's ending, I tend to agree with Ebert:
'Later, the movie takes still another turn. A lot of recent films seem unsatisfied unless they can add final scenes that redefine the reality of everything that has gone before; call it the Keyser Soze syndrome.'
Just to give the movie a twist, we're supposed to transpose the original presentation of the plot with the reality version of a man beating himself up in a mimed fight against an invisible attacker, holding his own hand down while acid is poured onto it, and other farcical moments that result when an originally dynamic tension between two characters is played backwards as merely id and ego doing a stage play. It kind of works once because we don't know the outcome when we view each individual scene, but if you go back over each thing that happens, it doesn't really hold up, especially the resulting need to shoot your own mouth to exorcise the demon of one of your selves.
But he *loves* the girl in the end. Isn't that cute? Nihilism gives way to romance. Was the nihilism real? No more so than Starbuck's being hurt by the pseudo-anti-commercialism that *they paid for* (the 2nd on record, Austin Powers being the first).
I had my own intuition and valuable clues to guide me on this movie choice, but I ignored them. Clue #1: Brad Pit. Brad in a movie means that there's going to be a phony, poser character. Clue #2, Meat Loaf with breasts. From the man who slipped Rosie O' Donnell the tongue, we should have heard this and passed right by.
I walked out of the theater so I could return to my life of rat-race job, shiny materialism, and masturbational self-improvement. But if Brad Pit in a dorky suit is the cure for my ills, I'm going to be Jacking off for a long time.