An amazing sibling to American Beauty

Rating: 10/10 (12 July 2001)

Fight Club is, in short, an amazing movie.
It is amazing that it has such popularity, yet the real nature of the plot is still a mystery to someone watching the film for the first time.
It is amazing that it can produce such polarized views from a populace, yet still garner such high rankings to be in the Top 40 of all time.
But not only that, Fight Club is amazing because it combines terrific directing (David Filchner - Se7en, The Game) with terrific acting (Brad Pitt - Se7en, 12 Monkeys, Interview With a Vampire; Ed Norton - American History X), a great plot and social commentary that rivals American Beauty for its satirism and black humor.
Indeed, American Beauty and Fight Club are like siblings. Both movies intertwine commentaries throughout a basically goofy and funny plot and turn potential comedies into something far deeper and thought-provoking.
And just like American Beauty, Fight Club has its haters, the people who cannot stand the movie, the people who think it has no point, the people who refuse or are unable to grasp the underlying condemnation of their materialistic world.
And that commentary is exactly what makes American Beauty and Fight Club a pair of instant classics. When society looks back at the turn of the 2d/3d millennium, these two movies will tell them volumes about our decadence, our shallowness and our misguided priorities.
Overall Fight Club is not a cinematic classic, in the true Citizen Kane/Casablanca sense of the word. But it IS a classic, one of several movies that society of the future will look to to grasp our understanding of life. Fight Club is an excellent movie, with only minor flaws (the plot twist towards the end does leave some plot holes unfortunately: mainly the car crash scene). It is well-acted, well-directed, well-thought out, and it joins American Beauty and American Psycho as being one of the finest examples of contemporary black satire ever made.
And did anyone else notice that Papa Roach took lines from this movie and used it in their song, "Between Angels and Insects"?
9/10 (With a possible 10 after a 2d viewing)