In this other world, everything is not at all otherworldly, but darkly starkly breathtaking...

Rating: 10/10 (24 April 2010)

Fight Club (1999)
Such an inventive, twisting, intelligent, seamless movie you'll rarely rarely find. If you want logic or sunshine, forget about it. If you don't mind diving down, getting lost, gasping, and shaking your head in appreciative amazement, this is your movie.
Any number of things could go wrong when you have so much depending on the two main male characters each presenting a psychology meant to be a yin and yang pairing, but nothing goes wrong here. Brad Pitt is confident, virile, beautiful in every way that Edward Norton is not. When they meet, so to speak, Norton is transformed, and the wild events that follow seem vaguely possible, even if patently impossible. It's a crazy ride and a beautiful one, dark and funny, and even a little romantic (the woman sidekick is played to perfection by Helena Bonham Carter).
Chuck Palahniuk's novel is the basis for all this inventive insanity, and you give director David Fincher credit for even thinking it was filmable. It was a huge effort in every way--assembling the cast, arranging all the special effects, creating the dark and drained color palette, working in the spasmodic soundtrack (effects and music both), on and on. Not to mention just editing it so that it made sense. Which it does. Fincher is a music video director at heart, and that feel is not lost here, to his benefit (the two other films of his I've seen are also visually athletic, the archetypally atmospheric Se7en and the more straight up Panic Room).
Fight Club has to be seen for what it is. When I first saw it a year ago, finally, it struck me as trying too hard, and a little outlandish, I mean, it's all so improbable, life on steroids and with sunglasses on in the dark. But this time all this craziness was exactly right, and within the film, within the rules of this special universe inside the film itself, it isn't crazy at all, but convincing and gut level perfect. Step away and don't look back. Perfect stuff.