Fight Club Review

Director David Fincher’s career has been based around dark films. From the biblically gruesome thriller Se7en to the troubling hunt of a cryptic serial killer in Zodiac, Fincher’s filmography is decidedly brooding.
Perhaps Fincher’s magnum opus, however, is his adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk’s novel Fight Club. The story revolves around an unnamed protagonist, (Edward Norton (let’s call him Joe)) who suffers from insomnia, and resorts to attending group sessions for terminally ill people to help him sleep. He is tired of his materialistic and monotonous lifestyle and, after his apartment explodes, seeks help from ‘single serving friend’ Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt). As a condition of lodging with Durden, Joe must start a fight with him, an action which evolves into weekly meetings of fatherless, aggressive men, wanting to exert their rage. As the story progresses, so does the club, eventually morphing into a revolutionary group of soldiers, ‘Project Mayhem’, willing to do anything that their leaders say. Stirring up trouble in the middle of this maelstrom of anarchy is Marla Singer (Helena Bonham Carter), a woman Joe meets at a support group, and subsequent love interest for Tyler.
All the characters in Fight Club are stars in their own right, from the frenetic and boisterous Durden to the reserved and afflicted Joe, played sublimely by Pitt and Norton respectively.
The cinematography in Fight Club is really quite impressive, surrealistically fluctuating from conventional filming and shifting frames with subliminal flashes, always keeping the real intentions of the film ambiguous, something which is affirmed in the final scenes. I’m reminded of Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream in certain scenes, the dark subject matter punctuated by dazzling picture.
Fight Club is a fantastic piece of film, a sharp stab at consumer culture, and excellent example of book-to-film adaptations. So often there are films that never really capture the magic of the novel, failing to draw the appropriate imagery, disappointing many people. Chuck Palahniuk is quoted as saying that he prefers the ending of the film to the ending that he gave the book, and as someone who has experienced both, I’m going to have to agree with him.