Awesome

Rating: 10/10 (30 September 2000)

This is hardly the dumb martial arts flick I was expecting. The film I can compare it most to is Terry Gilliam's 1985 comic fantasy nightmare, Brazil, except it's even better. It's all about life spiraling out of control--an individual's life, a society, a civilization, maybe even God himself. That Fight Club seems to have earned the accolades of both nihilists and moralists, as well as repelled others of both stripes, is a testament to its even-handedness. Underneath its absurd viciousness, there's a truth to the desperation it sees in the lives of ordinary men who find themselves cogs in the Machine, men who yearn to tear it all down. But if there's sympathy for their taste for manly struggle, for the pungent reality of blood in their mouths, and their misty dreams of a Kaczynskiesque hunter-gatherer caveman utopia, there's also no doubt about the dark roads down which such formless rage will lead, where jack-booted armies and madness are the only rewards for despair. And the real answer might have been under a man's nose all along. It's a great film.