A film that tries to be meaningful

Rating: 6/10 (21 March 2001)

SPOILERS
Fight Club is an interesting movie. On one level, it is a very funny film. Some of the writing is fabulous. On the other level, as a meaningful and philosophical film, it fails by a large margin.
When I first saw Fight Club it was on the DVD special edition. I had avoided hearing anything about the film, and thus the inherent spoilers about the narrator's true nature were still there for me to be surprised about. When I first learned that him and Tyler were supposed to be the same person, I was thrown for a loop. I figured that there was no way the movie could pull such a cheap trick on me.
When the movie ended, I was left with a very empty feeling. What I had just seen was at once supurbly edited and very humerous, but I felt that there was another side to it. On the second viewing I finally realized that it was nothing more than an amatuerish effort to use "buzzwords" to evoke responses from people. I watched the film a second time and paid closer attention to the movie's main message. I even tried to imagine what it would be like to follow the film's message, and so I thus placed my mind into a realm so I could just absorb and obey what the film was trying to say.
After the second viewing, I realized that at most the film was trying to juxtapose two different films into one. The first sequence, before the establishment of Fight Club (some of the following scenes not directly involving Fight Club or Project Mayhem were also top-notch), was amazingly well-written. The characters interacted very well with each other. Once Fight Club began, the movie took a turn for the worse.
The sequences of Fight Club and Project Mayhem were nothing more than an amateurish attempt to create a physical representation of a philosophy that in general makes sense. It tried to say (basically) that once you lost everything, your life began to have true meaning. "Your life is not the sum of your possessions" or something like that.
While this message is powerful and inherently a "buzzword", the representation of this philosophy in Fight Club boiled down to chaos. While this was on one level a workmanlike way of handling it, I would have much preferred to see the movie evolve along the lines of discussional based philosophy (perhaps the planning of some of Project Mayhem and a nice bit of why it is ocurring would have been acceptable).
I think that Fight Club had the chance to be a very good film. It did not handle itself properly (although this would never have been fixed since it was based on a book). Some sequences were very good and very meaningful, but the handling of the philosophies in a tangible manner came off as very amateur and base. I just wish that maybe the filmmakers would have explored some of the issues in a musing style rather than in a physical representation.