Extreme-ly good

Rating: 10/10 (3 March 2001)

After 1997 and 1998 my hope for seeing a breakthrough in modern cinema, or at least a stream of really good movies seemed hopelessly doomed. Just like the narrator of Fight Club, I should have been prepared for a surprise. In 1999 there was Being John Malcovich, American Beauty, the Sixth Sense and best of all, Fight Club. Too bad the year 2000 saw a lot of the same, old boring junk come out again.
I understand how some people feel repulsed by this movie. Yes, the violence is graphic, much different from the clean, movie-cut violence from your standard action movie. Violence has consequences on you... you don't just get punched in the face and then you're back to normal after 20 minutes. Yes, it's unsettling, but nothing is gratuitous.
Much less I understand how some "big people" deliberately missed the point by calling this movie dangerous or fascist. The revolution we see in the movie is much closer to the anarchist sabotages during the 18-hundreds, and the reasons are the same. They movie doesn't tell you that sabotages are right, but it shows you the reasons that led to that kind of behaviour. What we see here is criticism at our society's faults, and the film hardly advocates terrorism; yes, unlike American Beauty, it is stretched to extreme consequences, and that's exactly the point: we HAVE to avoid a society ruled only by capitalism and money, because in such a place we are bound to lose our soul. You can think of American Beauty a hand that points a finger at our society's cr*p from the distance, and you can think of Fight Club as a hand that makes you see the cr*ap by smashing your face in it. And you will be blown away when you understand that the hand is YOUR hand. By the way, am I the only one that sees a parallelism between The Narrator and Pirandello's One, No One, and One Hundred Thousands? Although the latter is less anarchist, both the characters think about who they really are, and how they've become a tool. Both end up so frustrated they literally lose their identity.
Fight Club deals with problems without being formulaic and preachy. And it manages it be entertaining, visually incredible, and funny. I can't recommend this movie to everyone, as I understand some will feel too unsettled by it (it rocks your world in every possible way). As for me... I don't think I could ask more from a movie...
10/10