Fight Club

There are some movies that make you think. Others make you feel. Few movies can provide such a powerful impact that the thoughts and feeling evoked engulf you completely. Fight Club is the type of movie that you will either hate or love after watching. You cannot experience this film without have extremely strong emotions come up. The story centers on the Narrator (Edward Norton). A mild manner young man that goes to work each day, shops in the latest, trendy catalogues for tasteful furniture and drifts through his life. The story shows him as such an everyman that no name is ever given to him. He is just the narrator. He is plagued by insomnia, caught in the netherworld between wakefulness and sleep he takes odd jobs at night to avoid being alone with himself. He travels a lot for work, airplanes make up a large part of his world. He describes his world as a one serving world. Small bottles of hotel shampoo, take out food in disposable containers and even his ‘friends’ the people he meets on the plane are ‘one serving friends’, he talks to them on the plane but never again. His doctor recommends that he see people with real problems so he sends the narrator to a support group for men with testicular cancer. There he meets Bob (Meat Loaf) a man with huge breasts as a result of losing both his testicles. The narrator finds he can cry cradled in Bob’s arms and soon he finds that he is a support group junkie, a tourist going from group to group finding his only releases among the strangers. After a short while he notices a young woman at all his meetings, including the testicular cancer one. Marla (Helena Bonham Carter) is also a tourist and the narrator confronts her splitting up the meetings between them. On one flight the narrator meets Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt). A young man that makes expensive soap and is a complete anarchist. Tyler winds up taking the narrator under his wing and the form the first fight club. Fight club starts off as a place for men to express themselves physically and get out all the frustrations that the materialistic world imposes on them. Soon, Tyler takes it to another level and fight club becomes a wide spread anarchist movement.

The acting in this film is out right incredible, Norton is perhaps the best male lead around today. I thought nothing could match is performance in American History X but Fight Club does it. His role of the narrator shows a man in deep inner conflict but still allows enough humanity to remain so that we always can identify with him and his plight. Carter is spooky in this film. Emaciated, foul mouth spectra that drifts through the scenes poking the establishment in every way possible. She is completely self-absorbed and is not afraid at all to show it. Brad Pitt as an actor is not afraid to take himself away from the pretty boy roles. Like in his classic Kalifronia, Pitt is dark and gritty here. His Tyler is the fountain of wisdom for the narrator. Always ready to explain everything in life from how to make explosives from soap to the meaning of pain in growth. Pitt takes his performance to the peak treading the fine line between control and madness.

The director David Fincher is excellent once again. Known for such films as Alien 3, Se7en, and the Game he is well used to the dark side of man’s innermost self. He explores this theme deeper and to a far more risqué depth then most filmmakers would dare. Fincher plays with the audience often at their own expense. In the beginning we see single frame flashes of Tyler long before the narrator meets him. (Thankfully DVD players can step through frames). There are also times when it looks like the film is off the sprockets. Each scene is crafted like a painting from a nightmare. The sound booms around you.

The two disc set is about the best I have seen. The first disc with the film even starts with a phony warning from Tyler. The disc includes a THX certified calibration area to set up the audio and video of your system. The second disc has a multitude of features including some great choices for deleted scenes with a comparison between them and the scene that made it into the movie. These disc go far beyond the usual in every way. This is a must have. Love it or hate it you will be mesmerized by it.

Text of the third Warning on the first disc: