Fight Club Movie Review and Summary (1999) | roger ebert (2023)

"Fight Club" is the most honest and light-hearted big-star fascist movie since "desire of death, a festival of violence in which the heroes sign licenses to drink, smoke, fuck and beat each other up.

Sometimes they beat themselves up for a change, it's macho porn, the sex movie that Hollywood has been moving towards for years, in which eroticism between the sexes is replaced by locker room fights between men. Women who have spent their entire lives practicing how to handle the toddler pose will instinctively take notice; Men can enjoy the testosterone rush. The fact that it's very well done and has a great first act certainly muddies the matter.

Edward NortonHe plays a depressed loner from the city to this point full of fear. He describes his world in sardonic social satire dialogue. His life and his work drive him crazy. To deal with his pain, he attends 12-step meetings where he can embrace those less fortunate than himself and find catharsis in his suffering. It's ironic that the first meeting he attends is for post-op testicular cancer victims, since the entire movie is about men who are afraid of losing their balls.

These early scenes have a nice sly undertone; They are narrated by Norton's character in voice mode.natanael westused in Miss Lonelyhearts. For reasons that will become clear later, he is only known as the narrator. The meetings act like a sedative, and his life is barely manageable when tragedy strikes: he begins to notice Marla (Helena Bonham Carter) at the meetings. She is a "tourist" like him, someone who is just addicted to meetings. She spoils it. She knows it's fake, but wants to believe that the pain of others is real.

On a plane, he has another key meeting with Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), a man whose kind walks through the mists. He seems to be able to see directly into the Storyteller's soul, and soon after, when the Storyteller's high-rise apartment turns into a ball of fire, he turns to Tyler for protection. He gets more than that. He joins the First Floor Fight Club, a secret society of men who gather to find freedom and self-actualization by beating each other to a pulp.

At about this point, the movie stops being smart, wild and funny and turns into one of the most brutal, relentless and continuous acts of violence ever filmed. While sane people know that if you hit someone hard enough with your bare hand you'll end up with broken bones, the guys in "Fight Club" have fists of steel and punch each other while the guys in the effects of sound hit them like crazy. Naugahyde sofas with ping pong paddles. The movie takes another turn later. Many recent movies seem unfulfilled unless they can add final scenes that redefine the reality of all that came before; Call it Keyser-Soze Syndrome.

What is this about? According to Durden, it is about freeing oneself from the shackles of modern life that imprison and castrate men. By being willing to give and receive pain and risk death, Fight Club members find freedom. movies like "hatch' (1997), they have to play as cartoons for Durden. He is a shadowy and charismatic figure capable of inspiring a legion of big city men to descend into the secret cellars of a fight club and beat each other up.

Only gradually are the last sketches of his master plan revealed. Is Tyler Durden really a leader of men with a useful philosophy? "Only when we've lost everything can we do something," he says, sounding like a man who stumbled upon the Nietzsche exhibit on his way to the cafeteria in Borders. In my opinion, he does not have useful truths. He is a tyrant: Werner Erhard plus S&M, an undecorated leather club operator. No Fight Club member becomes stronger or freer through membership; they are reduced to pathetic cultists. Give them black shirts and register them as skinheads. Whether Durden represents hidden aspects of the male psyche is a question the film uses as a loophole, but he can't escape it, because "Fight Club" isn't about his ending, it's about his plot.

Of course, "Fight Club" itself does not represent Durden's philosophy. It's a warning against that, I suppose; One reviewer I like says it's "an eye-opening argument about the bestial nature of humans and what can happen when the crippling effects of daily monotony make people go a little crazy." This makes people go a little crazy. Although the experts will be able to rationalize the film as an argument against the behavior shown, I hope that the public will like the behavior but not the argument. They will surely buy tickets because they can see Pitt and Norton fucking; A lot more people will leave this movie and fight than leave it to discuss Tyler Durden's moral philosophy. The visuals in movies like this speak for themselves, and it takes a lot of storytelling (or storytelling) to argue against them.

God knows the actors work hard enough. Norton and Pitt suffer almost as much physical suffering in this film as theyDemi Mooresupported on "gi jane', and Helena Bonham Carter creates a feisty, chain-smoking, hellcat who's probably so mad that neither of them thinks having sex with her is as much fun as breaking their noses. When you see good actors in a project like this, ask yourself if they sign up as an alternative to canyoning.

The film was directeddavid fincherand written byjim uhls, which adapted the novel byChuck Palahniuk. In many ways it's like a Fincher movie"The game' (1997), with intensified violence for adolescents of all ages. This movie was also about a trial process where a man drowning in capitalism (miguel douglas) the rug of his life is torn up and he must learn to fight for survival. I admired The Game much more than Fight Club because it really got to the point, whereas the message in Fight Club is like bloody shards of redemptive social content thrown into the howling crowd.

Fincher is a good director (his credits include Alien 3, one of the best looking bad movies I've ever seen, andSeven,, the chilling and intelligent thriller). With "Fight Club" he seems to be putting himself to some sort of test: how far can he push himself? He comments above and below the plot. If everything had gone on as explored in the first act, it could have been a great movie. But the second act is pandering and the third is a hoax, and whatever Fincher thinks the message is, it's not what most viewers will understand. "Fight Club" is excitement masquerading as philosophy: the kind of ride that makes some people throw up and others just can't wait to get back on it.