A "brief" look at why so many didn't like Fight Club, and why they missed out on the best picture of 1999.

Rating: Null/10 (2 January 2000)

I'm going to keep this as short as I can and completely spoiler free, because you need to see this film with as little knowledge of it as possible. Most of the negative responses I have garnered about this movie has to do with the second half of the film, in which it deals with a lot more anarchistic issues. The ending also drew a bad response, mainly because it was almost unbelieveable how any of the previous events fit into the ending. Other complaints were that it was too violent and that it was "homoerotic". I'll try to address all these as efficiently and shortly as I can.
First of all, Fight Club is not unlike the classic Animal Farm, in that symbolism is present in the film, although not quite as heavily. The ending should be looked upon with this fact, mainly because I, myself, found it a little hard to swallow. I have only seen the film once, so I haven't been able to put all of the pieces together, but so far, the pieces fit. If you can't stand the presence of any political or governmental stances in films, then you should probably wait until later to see this film, along with Three Kings among other great films. This movie is basically about "fighting the system", in my personal opinion, and it is much more that just a typical action film. As for those "Homoerotic" and "over-violent" criticisms, the Homoeroticism term seems pretty shallow to me, mainly because it deals with (as corny as this may sound) brotherhood and masculine issues, and not with physical attractions toward one another. Think Feminism, only for men. The over-violence claims are fitting, and I can't argue with them, because the fights are very emotional and brutal. Let's face it, if there is anything that you can sincerely complain about, it's that this film does have a fair amount of violence in it. I can only say that it is a part of Fincher's style, and if you decided to see this, certainly you kept in mind of his other works like Se7en and Alien3.
All in all, I highly recommend this movie, and if you can remember these things whenever you do see this (I'm not sure if it is still playing in the U.S. or not.) you will end up loving it like so many others have.