Fight Club Is a Unique Cinematic Experience

Rating: Null/10 (25 May 2015)

*SPOILERS* Whether Fight Club is deserving of the tenth highest rated movie on IMDb, I still can't figure out. It's definitely up there, but, if it takes the cake, I still don't know. Watching Edward Norton portray The Narrator in this movie is at times serious, but at other times could not be funnier. The first twenty to thirty minutes of this movie feel like a build-up to the introduction of Brad Pitt's Tyler Durden yet, at the same time not. For many, the first quarter of the movie will make you forget that Brad Pitt will even make an entrance and for others, that's all they will be anticipating. As The Narrator constantly attends sessions for people who have issues which he explains to be his enjoyment (most notably the group for victims of testicular cancer), you really get an insight to just how messed up The Narrator really is. Then, Helena Bonham Carter begins attending the same sessions which screws with The Narrator. Carter's portrayal of Marla Singer is great in this movie. However, I do wish her character had some more importance to the plot, as she was really just used to foreshadow.
Then Tyler Durden steps into the picture. A soap making (I won't explain the purpose of the soap), uncaring guy with almost nothing left to lose.
If, while you were reading most of the second part of that paragraph you forgot about Pitt's character, that's how I felt. However, when he finally made his appearance, there was no way I could forget him.
The first time the idea of Fight Club is mentioned between the two, that is what the rest of the movie centers around, as the title would suggest. You see people who beat each other up for fun and not even hold the slightest bit of a grudge on the other. The most notable example of this would be when The Narrator destroys Angel Face's (Jared Leto) face. These people beat the crap out of each other for fun and it soon becomes much more than an underground fighting arena.
What the The Narrator doesn't know is that Tyler Durden decided to take Fight Club and turn it into Project Mayhem, a terrorist-like group that goes around destroying buildings, landmarks, stores, anything they can. Tyler decides to make one of Project Mayhem's rules to not be able to ask any questions about the project so that The Narrator cannot find out anything about it, however, he already knows everything.
There's not really a point to go into anymore detail before telling you what makes this such an amazing film. You think you're looking at two opposites (The Narrator and Tyler), and you'd be right. However, one's not real. The entire time, whenever conversations occur between the two, The Narrator is just talking to himself. Tyler Durden is the Narrator's imaginary representation of what he wants to be, instead of working a boring desk job that he hates.
One example of foreshadowing occurs when Tyler has just had sex with Marla but the Narrator doesn't know it was actually him. The Narrator refers to himself and Tyler as "we" and Marla asks what he means. Another is when Marla sees a burn on the Narrator's hand and she asks where it's from. When forced to answer, The Narrator simply says that their conversation is over which is a way of telling the audience that he is not yet able to confront the fact that he did it to himself. The last example I will list is when the Narrator is explaining Tyler's (his) former jobs. He explains how Tyler was a film reel changer at a movie theater and how he would put suggestive frames into appropriate reels so that people would see them but not know they did. Nowhere in the movie does Tyler tell The Narrator anything about his past jobs which leaves you to infer that The Narrator was creating them to give his desired life some personality.
At the very end, after the Narrator has had fights with himself, the final scene sees The Narrator in a building looking out over the urban landscape, holding Marla's hand, about to be witness to the end product of Project Mayhem. When the buildings started to explode and The Narrator utters to Marla, "You've met me at a very strange time in my life," the first thing I thought of was after The Narrator had finished off Angel Face and said, "I felt like destroying something beautiful." He did it to Angel Face, and he did it to the city.
After reviewing my own analysis of this movie, I think I can safely say that it is deserving of the tenth highest rating. The film was intriguing from beginning to end. David Fincher is a magnificent director and Edward Norton and Brad Pitt deliver some of their greatest performances. Though I gave it a ten, this is not my favorite movie (though that's not exactly what a ten infers), I just couldn't find any major flaws or anything that made me dislike it. As the title of this review would suggest, I do indeed find it a unique cinematic experience, due to great acting, directing, writing, cinematography and an unforgettable twist. Fight Club is a great film.