It Had Some Major Problems For Me

Rating: 8/10 (16 January 2014)

So I re-watched Fight Club for the first time in a few years, having liked it very much the first time.
David Fincher is a fantastic director and the directing in this movie is pretty fantastic. The editing and other elements are also of highest order, as Fincher's films usually are.
My problems with the film lie within the script, which seems to get totally lost in itself. Fight Club's themes of consumerism and materialism and existentialism are obvious, since they are in the foreground, not tying to hide in the background for interpretation. If you think you're a movie buff for understanding this, you're not. It's simple to understand but is at the same time thought provoking, since the movie is about big ideas.
Free yourself from society. Accept that your life is meaningless. Destroy yourself to find out who you really are. You are capable of more than you think. Fight Club states these ideas as blatantly as I just did. It shows the main characters being freed and we root for them, but really, do we see a whole lot of benefit to this lifestyle?
The film seems to suggest that there is an extent to which this lifestyle becomes dangerous and is unhealthy, yet the film still glorifies it, suggesting no middle ground as to how far we should carry out its philosophies, other than going insane and causing an apocalypse.
Another problem I felt was that the "space monkeys" in the film are all freeing themselves from being slaves to their possessions and society, yet they act like drones when embracing Tyler's philosophies. They become just as much victims to fight club and project mayhem as they were to their societies rules.
Is the point of the movie to lose yourself in these ideas? To become a slave to new philosophies in exchange for being a slave to society? The last few minutes seems to suggest that Norton's character regrets his actions and that he has gone too far, but where, does the film suggest, is the middle ground? Despite all this, Fight Club is electrifying and hyper throughout in a way that few movies are and for that it is worth seeing. The ideas are good, but lose track of themselves. Only fanboys think this is one of the best films of all time. It's not, you only like it cause it's cool and you think you're a member of a cult.