Fight Club

Fight Club (David Fincher, 1999)

An insomniac office worker looking for a way to change his life crosses paths with a devil-may-care soap maker and they form an underground fight club that evolves into something much, much more...

From my generation, the 25-35 years old people of today, Fight Club represents one of the Canons of contemporary Cinema along with films like Pulp Fiction, Snatch, Requiem For a Dream, and Donnie Darko. This is a big studio piece of auteur film that challenges some and seduces others. Coming from director David Fincher (with previous films such as Se7en, The Game, Alien 3, and notable music videos), we have a misanthropic view on the post-modern world of lonerism and how it can alienate people who won’t fit into society.

Our protagonist (Edward Norton), represents a lot of people from his generation, geeks and loners who never felt alone anyway? And he makes friends (Brad Pitt, Helena Bonham-Carter) with peculiar characters that will lead him to an underground world that will make him discover lots about himself and that he didn’t expect to find.

In a way, this is an interesting film that plays one hand on some of the sickness of people today getting more and more isolated by the virtual world, the extensions of us as our social network personas, and how our lives are leaded by exterior establishment that our actions can’t really change. But on the other hand, this is a very overrated picture that stands on a podium of mainstream classics because of easy twists and turns that would just depreciate the script and the plot. This kind of manipulation of the viewer’s perception is easy in the most pejorative way possible and it doesn’t help Fincher get into a good storyteller mood. Just like a twisted old man named Hitchcock once said; I don’t like whodunits. And to me, Fight Club felt just like that because once you know the twist, the movie stops and its audience looses all its interest in the story.

However, in the later years, Fincher mastered his craft much better with his near masterpiece The Social Network or his great Zodiac where he handles the saying that the chase is better than the catch. So for the case of Fight Club, it is still a very entertaining piece of film and showcases a great cinematography from Jeff Cronenweth and a very strong cast. It just didn’t stand for me as a classic great film from the 1990’s.