Excellent

Rating: 10/10 (30 January 2001)

Dealing with our society's faults is not easy task. This movie does it perfectly and, most important, is not pretentious enough to give answers and teach people what to do about it. Many questions whose answers are left to the viewer arise through this film. Is Tyler Durden really crazy? Was the fight club just a product of the narrator's increasing paranoia or rather a cure to his frustrations (or both?). Were the people in project Mayhem finding their real ego or were they just followers? Is the world we see really what we think it is, and are we actually who we think we are? Is it possible to change the world, and how far can we go to change it?
Paid critics trashed this movie. Those reviews - some of which were so empty they were laughable - were exactly part of the system this movie wants to criticize, and therefore came out like actual glorification. Those same critics believed that Pulp Fiction dealt with the pornography of violence (strangely enough I never found any other movie where killers were so "cool"). Or they strongly believed that the light-hearted American Beauty dealt with our society's real faults ("...there's so much beauty in the world"... yeah, I'd like to see what people in Mexico City's surroundings think about that).
Fight Club is a violent movie, but violence is not mindless and it's not seen as "cool". It's simply a projection of one man's frustration with a system whose surface covers emptiness and lies. This man (let's call him "the narrator") has a job, nice house, and a decent amount of money. But in his subconsciousness he realizes that a consumeristic life will never tame his awareness that much in the world is wrong and he's not doing anything to change it. Physically, he is suffering from insomnia but inside he knows - because he is part of that system itself - that he's been keeping his eyes shut for years. As a consequence, he simply tries everything that would make him feel far away from being part of the world he knows. He starts going to cancer support groups and this makes him feel better - dying people show more humanity than anybody he's acquainted with, and being next to death sort of makes him feel numb. Eventually, a woman without any disease - like him - shows up and that's when he realizes he's hiding, rather than fighting. Thus, the beginning of "Fight Club"...
If you've never seen the movie you might think this is a rather depressing or very-intellectually "boring" film. It's not. There are exceptional graphics and it's very funny, the performances are excellent - especially Edward Norton's. Even Brad Pitt, who I never thought was anything special as an actor, is very impressive here.
The movie came out little more than one year ago. Will it be a classic in the next years? Let's see. As for my take, it's quite possibly the best movie or the 90's.