Missed opportunity

Rating: 6/10 (21 July 2010)

I've been reading the reviews on this film with interest during a lazy working afternoon, and feel compelled to add the conclusion I have drawn from them. Like many others I loved this movie when I first saw it (at the age of 21) but nine years down the line have grown tired of it, especially its philosophising which skim-reading just a handful of books reveals to be crass and unoriginal. I have been especially irritated and even worried by the people on here who hold this film up as some sort of manifesto for living; some even purport that the violence is realistic, a statement which anyone who has been in a real fight will find laughable.
"Fight Club" is certainly a very entertaining film, and I admire its controversial standpoint; however the thing that dooms it to being the province of immature young men is its ending. Now I've no grumble with the plot holes because after all it is a work of fiction, and its incoherence is part of its appeal. The problem lies in the fact that Tyler Durden is never really defeated. Sure, the Narrator "kills" Tyler by shooting himself, but he never repudiates him; even at the end he is this tongue-tied intellectual weakling. He could have destroyed Tyler's very ideology in a few well-chosen sentences about how his "space monkeys" have swapped one kind of mindless conformism for another, infinitely more dangerous one - and thus given both mature audiences and frustrated teenage boys a much more even-handed and intelligent discourse on the limits of freedom.
Unfortunately this doesn't happen, and all we are left with is a well-acted, beautifully-shot movie that says absolutely nothing meaningful precisely because it is so one-sided that it becomes a piece of propaganda, and therefore worthless. An aside: another film I loved as a teenager and saw again recently was Fincher's "Seven". Same problem here too: seen through more mature eyes it just comes across as an empty and vulgar piece of pseudo-intellectualism by someone who doesn't really understand the concepts he is attempting to discuss because he hasn't read enough about them. I really hope I don't come across sounding superior because I'm not that widely-read either; however I am bright enough to recognise my limitations in this regard, and to understand the value of a balanced discourse versus a simple screed.
Try Dante's unreachable "Divine Comedy" and Isiah Berlin's excellent essay "Two Concepts Of Liberty". These are the kind of pieces of work that you should be inviting to shape your perceptions of life, not some self-consciously proselytising Hollywood movie.