Fight Club

1999 was a very good year for movies, but nothing captured millennial angst quite so vividly as David Fincher’s bruising black comedy about what it means to be a man in modern America.

Edward Norton used to be an upwardly mobile urban professional; now, he’s pallid, neurotic and unhappy. In short order he bumps into Tyler Durden (Pitt), his apartment blows up, and everything changes. Gaudy and amoral, Tyler’s an id kind of guy: living on the edge is the only way he knows to feel alive. Pitt’s raw physical grace embodies everything his alter ego has lost touch with; they trade body blows for fun, and you can sense the gain in the pain. At least they are feeling something. Their ’club’ draws emasculates from across the city; under Tyler’s subtle guidance, the group evolves into an anarchist movement.

Jim Uhls’ cold, clever screenplay, from Chuck Palahniuk’s novel, is a millennial mantra of seditious agit prop. Shot in a convulsive, stream-of-unconsciousness style, with disruptive subliminals, freeze frames and fantasy cutaways, the film does everything short of rattling your seat to get a reaction. A quarter century down the road, we have a pretty good idea of who Tyler has become…

From the guitar roar on the Dust Brothers’ opening title track through to the thundering drums of Pixies’ Where Is My Mind? it is pure synapse-splitting sensory overload.

Kevin Maher, The Times

Blistering, hallucinatory, often brilliant, the film by David Fincher is a combination punch of social satire and sociopathology.

Carrie Rickey, Philadelphia Inquirer

The movie is not only anti-capitalism but anti-society, and, indeed, anti-God.

Alexander Walker, London Evening Standard

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