Recently named tthe fourth best movie of all-time in a British magazine poll.

Rating: 8/10 (25 October 2005)

I write this review because today I saw that Fight Club was named the 4th best movie of all time in a poll done by a British magazine ( the magazine wasn't named in the AP report). And this led me to question. How good is Fight Club? Seeing as how by now there has been several standard reviews of this movie I need not go into what the plot is or how superb the acting, directing, or scriptwriting was, but I think this recent poll and all the internet clamor surrounding this movie leads me to ask another question. Why has Fight Club become such a watershed movie?
Fight Club has the interesting distinction of being both underrated and overrated. When it came out it was largely underrated, which is odd since it came under a cloud of criticism for its violent subject matter and it starred two of the biggest Hollywood Stars then as well as now. But this movie really only hit critical mass until it went to Video and DVD. Fight Club found its fan base amongst a lot of adolescent men who pretty much dug the concepts being thrown around. It was philosophical without being over anyone's head, and it was intelligent without being hard to digest. In short it was exactly what it rails against: a perfectly portioned package. It is and was a seminal movie that not only struck a chord with a generation of people, but also managed to be damn funny.
Fight Club is a great movie, but I do believe it has become a victim of its own success. Now people who watch this movie claim to inhabit it and literally worship the precepts espoused by it, ultimately, missing the whole point of the movie, which is the pursuit of honesty at all cost isn't enough of a sacrifice to truly be free. In the end you're just going to have eat a little crap. If you become obsessed with the fakeness of the world you are just as guilty of making it your master. But of course that interpretation as with others is completely subjective. I wish people could just watch this film and marvel at the story structure and laugh at the humor, because anything else is taking this movie entirely too seriously. And for the record Fight Club might deserve to be in the Top 100, but number 4 all time is pushing it!