Style, Not Much Substance

Rating: Null/10 (11 March 2000)

I've seen many reviewers here and elsewhere wax poetically about the greatness of "Fight Club". Indeed, the film is one of the most fascinating visual and aural trips of recent years. Taking his dark, gritty style seen in "Seven", Fincher shows true vision in showing us a different world. Some sequences -- the IKEA catalogue come to life, Tyler inserting porn snippets into a family film, the plane crash -- are brillant little pieces of filmmaking that take editing, sound design, and image to another level in Hollywood film.
However, it's one of the most emotionally empty films I've seen in quite some time. One can compare "Fight Club" to Oliver Stone's "Natural Born Killers" -- both are commentaries on aspects of contemporary society, both are violent, and relentless with the viewer. But, where "Fight Club" fails is in the humanity of its characters. The skill shown in "NBK" is making caricatures very real people; the failing of "Fight Club" is making anyone in the film approachable at all.
There's only one little glimmer of emotion in the piece, where Pitt and Norton first duke it out outside a little bar near the beginning of the film. If that theme -- guys who can, like big kids, fight and tumble just for the fun of it -- had been extended a bit further through the formation of the fight clubs, then showed how the clubs (and Norton's paranoid fantasy) went in a different direction, the film could have worked a bit better.
In all, "Fight Club" is an unfortunate example of the new breed of Hollywood directors who have a remarkable sense of visual style, with all the emotional range and storytelling ability of ... a bar of soap. I came away from "Fight Club" feeling as though I had seen the most brilliant and shallow film of all time. The film is a two-hour television commercial for teenage angst in developmentally immature twenty-somethings, Pitt and Norton transformed into ad spokesman screaming "My Life is So Empty". It will certainly dazzle you, but doesn't have much of a point and is, in the end, a waste of time. All I can say to the GenX'ers who liked this film: grow up. To the Hollywood execs that financed and distributed this mess: stop assuming that your audience has the intellectually capacity of a flea.