A cinematic thrillride and a warning to society. Two great movies that don't necessarily gel together.

Rating: 8/10 (14 February 2000)

Fight Club is the type of move that jumps up and screams "I'm a good movie." It offers so many good ideas and so many cinematic elements that it creates one heck of a wild ride. It is a film that reveals the plot pieces so delicately that you have to care about what's happening.
Fight Club is a thoughtful movie that thinks it could work best as a thriller disguised as an intellectual movie. The ideas are used to distract the viewer from trying to understand the underlying plot details. The ending is a bit of a stretch...to say the least. The somewhat bizarre chemistry between the two leads ends up slapping the viewer in the face. This is a good thing, however, but it is very difficult in determining if this has anything to do with the ideas. Perhaps there are some underlying thoughts to this deception, but I thought it was a bit of a distraction from determining why the movie was made.
There are certain thoughts I thought were very valuable in determining the purpose of the movie. When Tyler gives the Fight Club members an assignment to get in a fight with an ordinary person and lose, the Norton character says, "This is not as easy as you think, because most ordinary, normal people would do anything possible to avoid being in a fight." There is a breath of relief in this statement, and it says that most people are not the people in Fight Club. However, the knowledge that there are enough people that could cause a terrible revolution is terribly frightening. The best part of this idea is the culminating scene between Norton and his boss that turns out to be the most humorous and just downright worthwhile scenes of the past year.
Many people have said that Fight Club is corrupting our youth, and, yes, there has been a new upheaval of violent fight clubs spawning throughout the country since the movie's release. Whether it has something to do with the movie, I have no idea. I think we've been building up to it, through the violence our children see through movies, news, and on shows that present violent and aggressive characters as role models, like WWF and WCW wrestling. Perhaps Fight Club is more of a warning than an attempt to cause trouble. The authors have a somewhat resentment to the societal factors that deprive humans of obeying their nature. It is a call out to say that perhaps our image of the "perfect society" is not attainable. Deprive people of what comes natural, and there will be a nasty, unhealthy revolution. This can be used as a metaphor to the movie industry itself. After a prohibition by a board of ethics in the late '30s decided what would be appropriate to show in the movies, movie makers were angered for not being able to show their entire artistic vision. As time went by, filmmakers became so fed up with these restrictions that they started breaking and bending the rules wherever they could, without realizing the ethical consequences. The moviegoers went to see these movies because they had never been able to see them. No one really cared about what the negative repercussions would be from showing these movies, or whether these movies would make the world more perverted or violent. So now, we have Fight Club, a movie that is about the negative backlashes drawn from a deprivation of human nature, presented in a form that tries to break from the restrictions of film. The movie is overly violent, but I think that is part of the point. I don't think it criticizes the violence it portrays because it allows us to understand the thinking behind the violence. Instead, it exists on screen to wake the viewer up, and say "This is what society is becoming. Is this what we want? Are our solutions ever likely of determining the goals?" Fight club is definitely against restrictions, and that is apparent both in the plot of the movie and the actual existence of the movie itself.
The main criticisms I have against this movie deal with the fact that the blend of cinema and ideas don't seem to quite come together in any cohesive fashion. The cinema distracts from the ideas while the ideas are used as a distraction for the cinema. These are minor complaints, though, as there are so many valuable gifts from examining both of the film's elements. My rating: 9/10