Would a fight by any other name smell as sweet? : Fight Club

A review of Fight Club

When you watch a movie that’s based on a book and you haven’t read the book, you’re free to evaluate the movie in an unbiased manner. That’s what happened to me with Fight Club. The film is dark, literally and figuratively speaking, but director David Fincher knows what he is doing, and this film marks clear progress from his last, Se7en. A sense of gloom and otherworldliness pervades Fight Club throughout – you’re not here to laugh (if you do, then it will be out of shock or awe), and Fincher reminds you of that with every scene. The protagonists themselves are uniformly strange, yet compelling.

Edward Norton is a regular Joe office employee with one big problem – insomnia. One day, Norton (with no specific name in the film) meets Tyler Darden (Brad Pitt) on a flight. When he returns home that night, he finds his perfect apartment - and boring life - blasted into pieces by dynamite. Devoid of any belongings, he moves into Darden’s run-down house and needs very little encouragement to help start an underground fight club, where men battle it out one-on-one as a release from their mundane lives. The club soon becomes bigger than Norton likes, and as he races to somehow close it down before anarchy takes over the country, he discovers an unpleasant truth about himself.

Norton and Pitt nudge great performances out of each other. A film that moves at a steady pace till it socks you in the face in the end, Fight Club certainly makes engaging viewing. Go for it, or as Tyler Darden says, prove you're alive.