Fight Club David Fincher, 1999
5 Stars
I’ve never been one to follow a trend. Tell me to read a book, I’m probably not going to. Tell me a restaurant is great and I’ll find a million and one reasons to avoid checking it out.
As such, when it comes to a popular movie, chances are I’m going to take forever to watch it. The Hurt Locker, Sideways, The Big Lebowski, even ruddy Memento all sit, still in their cellophane wrapping, unwatched on my shelves.
There. I’ve admitted it.
And so, it took a great many years of one of my best friends bugging the hell out of me to watch David Fincher’s indie classic Fight Club. In fact, I think the first time I finally brought myself to watching it was my final year of university. So, going by that, I might just about come round to opening up The Hurt Locker sometime around 2020. If of course the rapture hasn’t got us by then.
In his beautiful illustration of the ultimate results of a lifetime in the IKEA-laced offices of nineties boredom and insomnia, David Fincher takes us on a roller-coaster ride through the realms of sanity, told through the words of the unknown Narrator of Chuck Palahniuk’s book of the same name.
Fight Club, as ingenious as it is first time round, however, is all the more intoxicating upon further viewings. Whereas in the initial viewing, one is enthralled by the fantastic mix of top notch directing and sublime storytelling, it takes a knowledge of the film’s final twist to truly appreciate the spectacular performances from the ever-unhinged Ed Norton and the tragic Helena Bonham Carter, both, quite frankly on the highest forms of their separate careers. Brad Pitt is also disturbingly believable as Norton’s dark half.
Dark, twisted, and in every way a fairy tale of the nineteen nineties, Fight Club is a shocking and powerful classic that gets better and better with every watch.
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