Fincher's best work

Rating: 10/10 (20 October 1999)

Fight Club is by far the best thing David Fincher has done... and also one of the best movies of the year.
Deliberately subversive, Fight Club is really about suckerpunching its audience, violating taboo after taboo in a way that is at once friendly and menacing. Subliminal images flicker in and out, the characters chat with the audience and the film only rarely flinches.
Better yet, it lingers on the plight of men. While it overdramatizes the male condition at times, it is at least willing to concede that all is not well in the land of testosterone... something few people are willing to either say or accept. Its best moments are when it shows what the military (once the proving ground of men) has become... reducing soldiers to nameless programmable drones - "The first rule of Project Mayhem is that you do not ask questions, sir." And when it talks about men, for all its playfulness, hipness and pop psychology, it is dead on more often than its wrong.
For all that, it still bows to one convention of Hollywood film - the violence, while containing a fair amount of blood, isn't in the least realistic. (long term consequences are absent) The grue in this film comes more from the violation of cherished taboos, the same way a good Clive Barker story does.
Anyhow, check it out and make sure you do it on the big screen - you'll never notice everything without that assistance!