If you haven’t seen Fight Club yet, well… Welcome to the twenty first century. How was it under that rock where you live? This movie was sort of a cultural event back in the late nineties. It wasn’t just a movie, it was The Thing everyone was talking about, and has since had every bit as much of an influence on the modern world cinema as Pulp Fiction and Goodfellas had had some years earlier. It’s certainly one of the must download movies of the decade.
The movie follows Edward Norton as the unnamed Narrator. We never find out his name. He works a dull, soul crushing white collar job. The movie came out about the same time as Office Space, and the two are compared quite often. They both follow some of the same trains of thought in terms of where they get their material, but Fight Club takes it in a much darker direction, while still actually remaining just as funny as the other film, in spite of not technically being a comedy film.
The narrator meets Tyler Durden, and the rest is history. Durden is a character who is completely free of the boundaries of society placed on most people. You know Kramer, from Seinfeld? He’s kind of like that. Just, imagine how dangerous, frightening, and at the same time, inspiring, Kramer would be if you took him out of the sitcom setting and put him into a world where his actions could result in serious consequences.
Tyler is really the heart of the film, forming the Fight Club alongside the narrator. The Fight Club begins innocently enough as a bare knuckle get together where white collar guys get together and beat each other up for the fun of it and to reaffirm their manhood in a society that has sissified them and turned them into cowardly cubicle slaves rather than raw, testosterone driven animals.
Once they start robbing banks and trying to take over the world, you see that the Fight Club is an expression of rage, that impotent rage that all men feel in a society that has castrated them in a symbolic way. The movie is outlandish and surreal, but this part isn’t. That anger is very real, and it seems entirely realistic that, given the right catalyst, men really could just go crazy and start blowing things up for no good reason (heck some guys already do it).
The ending is really something. Since then, it’s become sort of cliche to end with a big twist about who’s who, but at the time, it was really a new idea and it worked really well. A little gimmicky, maybe not even necessary to the purposes of the film, but it was really a surprise when you saw it the first time.
In the years since Fight Club, Ed Norton has become… Well he can be predictable. You always know exactly how he’s going to act from minute to minute. Interestingly, it’s Brad Pitt here who gives one of the best performances, and who would then go on to top it, over and over again, throughout the next several movies of his career. He tops this role in the Coen Brother’s Burn After Reading, and again in Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds. However, this role, and 12 Monkeys, were probably the two that really showed that he was a real actor, and not just a pretty boy.
Love it or hate it, this movie, as shocking, grotesque and violent as it may be, is one of the most influential of the last twenty years, and at the very least, deserves its due respect.
You can buy movies to download onto your PlayStation 3. Recent Movie Rental Many top TV series are now viewable online. A few actions movies that you can download online are ‘007 Casino Royale’ and ‘Above the Law’.