Part of 1999
You’re young. You have an easy, good paying desk job. You have a condo, Swedish furniture, artistic coffee tables and a fridge full of condiments. Yet you feel emotionally and spiritually empty. You eventually find comfort in going to support groups for leukemia and cancer victims when there’s nothing wrong with you until they’re hijacked from you by another faker. Then you meet Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), a man who shows you that not only can you live without material needs, but that self-destruction, the collapse of society, and making dynamite from soap might not be such a bad idea either.
While it may be held partially responsible for a generation of fragile white man-children being overcome by some nihilistic urge to troll an “unfair” world, director David Fincher’s stylish adaptation of author Chuck Palahniuk’s cult sensation is a satirical commentary on the very thing it helped birth. See it again, and decide for yourself.
“More a satire of wimpy-WASPy death wish-fulfillment fantasies than a battle cry for fed-up man-children, FIGHT CLUB would go on to be embraced hardest by meek (and mostly pale-skinned) dudes who could only dream of being as badass as Tyler Durden. They don't seem to notice they're the ones getting hit.” —Craig D. Lindsey, Nashville Scene
“So feverish is FIGHT CLUB, the nihilistic thriller based on Chuck Palahniuk's Gen X-istential novel, that thermometer contact might make mercury shatter…. Blistering, hallucinatory, often brilliant, the film by David Fincher is a combination punch of social satire and sociopathology.” —Carrie Rickey, Philadelphia Inquirer
“An outrageous mixture of brilliant technique, puerile philosophizing, trenchant satire and sensory overload, FIGHT CLUB is the most incendiary movie to come out of Hollywood in a long time. It's a mess, but one worth fighting about.” —David Ansen, Newsweek