Fight Club (David Fincher, 1999): USA, Germany

Reviewed by Jason Sanders.  Viewed at the Santa Barbara Film Festival.

Fincher brings a film to the screen that is stunningly amazing.  The story is compelling and it is a film that leaves you thinking non stop.  Fight Club, based on the book of the same name, introduces the sleeping disorder insomnia and the effects it has on people and their lives.  Of course the film is not as simple as that.  Fincher delivers a movie that takes insomnia to a whole new level.

The movie introduces the narrator, played by Edward Norton, who is an insomniac who has a desk job and the typical single man apartment.  Over time, he cannot handle his life, and feels the need to seek some sort of stress relief.  He does this by going to support groups that he has no reason to be in to let out his emotions.  It is in one of the support groups he meets Marla, who essentially has the same type of problem.  Marla being at the groups ruin it for him and he then meets Tyler Durden.  Tyler shows him another way to seek relief by fighting.  People see them fight, and more and more become interested and becomes an underground fight club.  Over time the fight club turns into something compared to a terrorist group mixed with a cult.  It is then that Edward Norton’s character realizes that he needs to stop Tyler and his newly formed Fight Club.

Edward Norton and Brad Pitt complement each other in this movie by basically contradicting each other.  After the big twist of the film, I started to realize the subtle hints of the twist early on in the film.  Fincher delivers such an outstanding film about the human psyche and human characteristics.  This movie is by far one of the best written films I have seen, and is a movie that does exactly what a movie should do, make you think.


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