Incredible

Rating: 10/10 (18 May 2001)

Fight Club is one of the most complex and most visually amazing movies of the last few years. It manages to be funny and shocking, thought-provoking and crazy, appealing and repelling usually all at the same time. The plot revolves around a truckload of concepts, one being a fight club (I think you figured that out). However, to think that this movie is about bare knuckle fighting would be wrong.
Some of the praise has to go to Chuck Palahniuk, who managed to address criticism at the capitalist society without being preachy. And most important, without trying to give out his own solution, but asking the reader (and then, the viewer) to think. But surely Fincher didn't disappoint: filling the movie with creative special effects, subliminals and nonlinear timeline, he made sure that the viewer fully experienced the story in the first person. More, the performances by the cast are all excellent.
Apparently, a couple of reviewers didn't like the twist, feeling that it was there for shock value. I couldn't disagree more.
Apart from the fact that these viewers obviously didn't read the book (if you read it, you would have seen that the movie had to develop its story like that), they missed the fact that the twist adds a whole new layer of psychological complexity to the movie, and most importantly reverses many concepts that were taking for granted until that moment: where complete control over the events was taken for granted, through the narrator's eyes we realize about how irrational his approach had been; we realize that where he thought he had already won over society, society had instead already hit him very, very hard. And, most important, we understand how the narrator developed a solution, albeit irrational, to his desires of friendship, revenge, and becoming a new man.
Comparisons to A Clockwork Orange are often made for this movie. On a certain level, the two movies are similar in the way they portray violence in a satiric way. However, I feel that the issues they deal with are different.
Easily a ten out of ten for me.