Fight Club Review

Rating: 9/10 (28 September 2017)

Do you really know when one situation ends and another begins? Are there gaps in your memory, where for some reason, you can't remember how you got somewhere? No? Well this is the case for the unnamed narrator in Fight Club. Looking for change, a depressed insomniac living a gray boring life is looking for relief; relief from the humdrum grind of his life. This leads into the emotion of the movie. Darkness shrouds the film at every corner. Seemingly to represent the crushing weight of uselessness the narrator feels towards his life. The darkness that encompasses nearly every scene almost allows the viewer to feel the weight and pressure of the narrators life. A justification for using this type of lighting may be because of how the story was being told. Narration occurred solely by the unnamed narrator, the main character. The audience is only allowed to see the story through his perspective. This leads into time gaps that occur in the film. Since the audience can only see the story from his perspective, the audience is limited to the knowledge that he has. For example, Tyler Durden, his alter-ego remains as a separate person throughout most of the movie. Time-gaps are also evident This limitation of perspective allows the narrator to shape what the audience thinks of him. Towards the end of the movie, the audience gets a glimpse of reality through the cameras in the parking garage. There are many situations within Fight Club that try to clue the audience into the fact that Tyler Durden and the narrator are actually the same person. These become much more evident towards the end of Fight Club. Tyler tells the narrator not to talk to anyone about him. This is an attempt to prevent others from revealing who Tyler Durden really is. It's actually a very intelligent way to partition his mind like this. However, the narrator himself realizes something is wrong very early in the movie. At one points he attempts to consult a professional asking him if he could die from insomnia or narcolepsy which involves appearing in places but can't remember how you got there. This scene shows directly that the narrator is experiencing this and is worried. If the narrator had gotten professional help and was prescribed medicine to treat his neurological illness, the acts of terrorism at the end of the movie might not have ever happened. A possible suggestion towards the narrators neurological illness was the beginning animation. During the starting credits, a brain and neurons with electrical impulses is shown at the beginning of Fight Club. This could have hinted towards the neurological illnesses that the narrator has and will face. The movie also used camera angles to help the audience experience what the characters in the movie were feeling. During the fight scenes, a lot of the time there was a bottom up view of the fight5ers. This happened especially when the narrator want barbaric on the blond man and beat him until he had sustained heavy injuries. This was to show the audience the position that the blond man was in, showing the true ferocity of the narrator. However, this isn't always the case. Other times throughout the movie camera angles seemed pretty neutral or just moved with the flow of the characters to provide a fluid viewing experience for the audience. During the end of the movie, the camera shot was used to show the vastness of the city being dismantled by Tyler's destruction. Fight Club also includes those strange up close and free moving, almost untethered shots where scenarios are shown such as when the narrators apartment is blown up or the 10 bombs that are scattered around the city. All of these shots together in one movie give the audience a unique perspective.