Not for the faint of mind

Rating: 9/10 (31 January 2003)

Fight Club, unfortunately, is a movie that requires reasonable intellect to understand. To say that this movie is about violence is insanely unfounded and unresearched. To get into the nitty gritty of Fight Club, you really have to study the words and the messages in the movie carefully. Obviously, not much can be said considering the ending of the film, but many things can be reasonably discussed.
This movie, while on the surface is about a shallow excuse to fight, is about the destruction (in the author's view) of men. Bob is actually a central character in the movie as he sums up EVERYTHING that men have become in today's society...women. Men need to cook, clean, and do things that were widely considered female tasks centuries before. But men, by their nature, are hunters and gatherers...warriors. This movie tries to say that men are being turned away from being warriors. Men are no longer men, they are no longer individuals but part of a larger, more feminine, mold. Bob is the epitome of this (thus the reason for Bob's resolution in the film, it matches the director's feelings towards this subjectification of men) ideal man...a body builder who has the societal joys of life only to have the world turn him upside down...as he has basically become a woman.
Fight Club nails home several messages that most movies and novels never get out the door with. Anti-society, anti-big business, and pro-communism...all of which go to the author's view of men as an enslaved perpetual being rather than a multitude of individuals.
The violence is the return of man to his most raw of forms, and Tyler Durden is the epitome of what every man wishes they could be. Fincher also makes an unbelievable amount of hints towards the film's 180 conclusion and causes second, third, fourth, and often times TENTH re-views. Excellent movie that is for "the enlightened" and not to be taken as a straightforward vehicle for Brad Pitt and some violence.