Rating: 
Summary: The most important movie of our time
Review: Hear me now and believe me later: this movie is one of the most important movies you will ever watch. Not only is it a great movie in it's own right, but the message it espouses is something everyone needs to hear.As Brad Pitt says in the movie, "You are not your job, you are not the clothes you wear..." An anti-materialism theme rings loudly throughout the movie, and it's something everyone should think about. "It is when we have nothing that we are free to do anything." Some reviews said the movie is fascist. That is wrong. If anything, the movie has a Communistic flavor. The party works together for the betterment of the people working in it. They all live together and work in shifts to mutually help the other party members. Their ultimate goal is to bring down the corporations and dissolve the state, aka the bourgeoisie. And as the group demonstrates in the scene with the Chief of Police, it is the working class, everyone around you, that is responsible. But don't let a fear of Communism get in the way of you watching this movie. The other themes and messages are important as well. Not only that, but it's just a darn good movie, with a great surprise ending. The DVD comes packed with hours upon hours of extra footage, including 4 full-length commentaries and a plethora of deleted scenes and behind-the-scenes vignettes. The bottom line is: see the movie. Buy the movie, whether you have to get this DVD, the single-disk DVD, the VHS, the LaserDisc or the 8mm film. Whatever you need to do, this movie is important, and everyone should experience it.
Rating:
Summary: The Second Of Two Essential DVD's
Review: The title of this review says it all. There are not nearly as many special effects to show off the features of DVD technology as there are in the Matrix, but it is an incredible movie with some awesome special features. I suggest people get this version (with the big red print) instead of the regular (the one with Brad Pitt holding up a bar of soap): The special features are fewer and the contents and packaging aren't nearly as nifty.
Rating: 
Summary: Lots of action, some comedy and very interesting plot
Review: This was a great movie. I removed 1 star because it was a little hard to follow the first time around... You really have to watch it a couple times to totally understand the whole plot. When I realized what was really going on I couldn't believe it and I had to watch the movie over again from my new perspective which made things all the more funny! Some of the material was a bit graphic but very realistic and kept me believing that the fights were real and that what was happening could really happen and may actually be happening as well. I loved Brad Pitts role in this movie and think that his character was chosen very nicely. I also loved the character that Meatloaf played. This is a great movie to watch again with different people around because the different commments that are made during the movie will change how you see it... and it will seem different each time. It is very much worth buying.
Rating:
Summary: A classic undermined by a sub-par DVD release
Review: For a long time after seeing it, I found it difficult to put together a coherent opinion of FIGHT CLUB. It so completely defied my every expectation that the collision between my preconceptions and what was actually there was catastrophic. I could only blubber: "gol-dang, that there moving picture shore was sumthin'."
Edward Norton, who's been a favorite of mine ever since the classic AMERICAN HISTORY X, stars as the nameless "Narrator" of the film, which is based - for the most part, faithfully - on the novel by Chuck Palahniuk. His character is an anonymous Gen-X office drone who works as a recall coordinator for a major car manufacturer. "Which car manufacturer?" asks a woman sitting next to him on a plane. "A *major* car manufacturer," he reassures her. This generic-ness is deliberate: many important characters go unnamed or misnamed, and the city most of the film takes place in is, like the city in SEVEN, completely unrecognizable. But like the city in SEVEN, the environs play a crucial role in setting the tone - where every building in SEVEN was weathered, rain-soaked, and Gothic, Fight Club's burg is full of giant glass-and-steel towers, yuppified apartment complexes, light, and motion. With a few plot-crucial exceptions, nothing looks more than ten years old; it's a town without a past. Norton, our hero, suffers from severe insomnia. His job is wearing him thin and he's trying to find solace in Ikea catalogs. (One memorable shot shows his empty apartment gradually being filled with designer furniture, complete with catalog-style photography and text descriptions.) His doctor flippantly advises him to check out the testicular cancer survivors' support group - "now those are some guys with real problems." Norton goes, and in short order finds his head being clung to the overdeveloped chest of a sobbing, massively overweight survivor named Bob (played by Meat Loaf, woohoo!). Then Norton opens up about his own, totally fraudulent, pain. The experience proves so cathartic that the narrator's insomnia is temporarily cured. Addicted to the experience, he begins to attend more groups (using a different name at each one)...which works fine, until he discovers Marla (Helena Bonham Carter) another voyeur like himself. (He's clued in by her appearance at the testicular cancer group.) Knowing that there's another faker ruins it for him, and his insomnia returns with a vengeance. Then, one night on a plane, he meets Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), the charismatic owner and sole employee of the Paper Street Soap Company. Tyler, who offers trenchant criticisms of capitalism and corporate society, seems like a charming flake, until the narrator gets home to find his apartment a blasted ruin. Needing a place to stay, he calls Tyler, and the two of them begin to form a special bond, culminating in a bloody fistfight outside a local bar. Exhilarated by the atavistic thrill of hand-to-hand combat, the two men agree to meet each week for another bout. Pretty soon other patrons start getting in on the action; after a month, they found Fight Club, an organization dedicated to liberating men from their day-to-day drudgery by allowing them a chance to beat the snot out of one another.
As Fight Club grows, Tyler becomes more and more messianic, organizing increasingly bold raids on what he sees as the symbols of an oppressive modern existence: running magnets over the tapes at Blockbuster, blowing up computers, and stealing human fat from a liposuction clinic to make bars of soap to sell to classy department stores. At first the newly liberated narrator follows Tyler enthusiastically, but his doubts increase as Fight Club expands exponentially, becoming a nationwide underground movement trying to undermine every aspect of society. New inductees are stripped of their identities and given shaved heads, black muscle shirts, and jackboots. The fascistic overtones of this revolution, and his mounting jealousy of Tyler's marathon sex bouts with Marla, pushes Norton's character further and further to the periphery of his own creation, until he decides he wants to cut Tyler back down to size. FIGHT CLUB has a new and unique energy to it, galvanized by Fincher's energetic photography and the throbbing music of the Dust Brothers. But what I really loved about this movie is the way it turns the tables on the Tyler Durdens and Gen-X whiners of this world. While being brutally honest, and funny, about the bleak realities of corporate life, this criticism is balmy and mild compared to the savaging the movie gives to self-appointed malcontents. Instead of liberating its members, the Fight Club simply offers a different kind of slavery, one that doesn't end with the five o'clock bell - "conformity in nonconformity." But this message is still delivered with wonderful, wonderful humor. In its own way, FIGHT CLUB was the best comedy of 1999. Unfortunately, I have to dock this DVD set a star because of Fox's unfathomable decision to release this stripped-down version. The original FIGHT CLUB DVD set was a groundbreaking accomplishment that set the stage for any number of memorable, high-quality releases later on. But not only has Fox chosen to undermine that standard, they've made the original nigh-impossible to obtain. It's a terrible shame, and one that I hope will eventually be rectified.
Rating:
Summary: The New and Ironic Walter Mitty
Review: "Fight Club" is a great film that not only satirizes self-help movement, but takes on the myth of our "alienation" that spawned it. Apart from the direction, acting, and technical achievement of the film, all of which are first-rate, the most fascinating thing about this work is the convoluted & self-referential story which plays out between the Narrator (Edward Norton), his world, the film, and our reality as viewers (it's a better and far more interesting illustration of paradox than "Adaptation", and a textbook example of the concept of irony).
The Narrator's story opens with a person named Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) about to kill him. The Narrator "backs up" and tries to tell the audience how this came about. He began attending 12-step and support groups to feel something--anything--in his numb existence...Thus he thought he could care, creating an illusory world where he "has a heart" but yet at the same time can feel superior to these unfortunate people. His fantasy is interrupted by the entrance of another "tourist" with the same agenda--Marla Singer (Helena Bonham Carter). She challenges his little fantasy. He gets angry and retreats back into his insomniac nights, endless television, and Ikea catalogs.
Then he meets Tyler, a pseudo-Niezschean malcontent soap-salesman who's fed up with modern existence. Their alienation and loneliness leads these two men to create--well, let's just call it a men's self-help group which Tyler claims gets them back to basics. The Narrator falls for this all the way. His consciousness is split--he knows there's truth to what Tyler is selling him, but also knows that he's taking part in promulgating a tired old lie: the myth that their primal selves has been narcotized by office life & materialism & consumerism. Their solution to this myth--the Fight Club--burgeons across the nation, sprouting "unauthorized" fight clubs. Tyler takes control like a fascist leader, manipulating the sheep created by the very society he despises. The Narrator knows that Tyler in fact needs this consumerist society, to be the iconoclast he is...Tyler replies by creating something called Operation Mayhem, a terrorist operation which will prove to the Narrator that Tyler means to destroy this society at its source: the credit institutions which make it possible for people to cover their essential nothingness by buying endless material goods. Tyler tries to break him out of his denial to make him go "all the way." Then a twist happens...A strange twist which renders everything seen so far doubly ironic. I don't want to give it away, but it should inspire lots of conversation about the concept of the self, the modern cliches of "man's alienation" and redemption from materialism.
What a great & classic film. Look for the subliminal images of Tyler before the Narrator meets him, which Fincher spliced into the film.
Rating:
Summary: Great film
Review: Fight Club is a wonderful movie. Even though it gets a little weird and past itself at the end, it is still great to watch. Fincher is one of the best directors around and never compromises. Norton and Pitt are top notch as usual. The first half of the film is really the best. "The things you own, end up owning you." The scene where Pitt threatens the 7-11 clerk to follow his dream of being a veteranarian or he'll kill him. Why men join the "fight clubs." These are themes that I wish the movie would have explored more. Instead the second half takes us on a rollercoaster plot to blow up a bunch of office buildings. Another great Fincher film. Doesn't hold a candle to SEVEN though.
Rating:
Summary: the best movie ever
Review: see it and you won't ever forget it.
Rating:
Summary: From Disenfranchised to Space Monkey
Review: I guess I firstly just have to say wow. Fincher did it again. Some don't like his style, the MTV director quick cut, but the movie was made for him to direct. Much like Seven it has a gritty aire to it, often washed in a color that lends to the mood of the scene. I also loved how Fincher let the audience know that Tyler was slowly emerging with his one frame subliminal shots of Pitt (which of course are echoed in the movie by Durden splicing porn into kid movies as a part time job). Pitt and Norton were superb and Carter was just right as the non conformist, life hating Marla. The movie certainly hits a chord with young men, not for the violence, but for the need to be something instead of having something. At first Tyler steers his merry little band against corporate America. The same corporate America that thinks that all consumers can be told what they want and when they want it. The same corporate America that proves time and time again that once apathy and conformity is spread, they can have their way with you. Not free market enterprize, but actual corporate political dialectic. Tyler showed his group, the young men, that they are not what they own, nor what other people think. He did this with a club that was only for men, that allowed their inner most carnal needs to be fulfilled. Then it happened. Jack began to notice that the group was no longer a club, but a regime. Once a band of men that were equal, at least during Fight Club, were now space monkeys. The lowest of the low on the planet. Doing anything Tyler bid or deemed nessecary, under totalitarian rule, without question. They left one prision to be in another, created for them, by Tyler, through conformitiy, the need to fit in, and hero worship. Jack has an attack of conscience or some may say a moment of clarity and the movie then, REALLY gives you a turn. I can't recommend this DVD enough on several levels. On the level of art, directing, acting, writing, and even lesson learning. You can't learn life lessons from films, but what you can do is see perspectives and what they can do. I loved it, from beginning to end, not a moment missed. ~CC P.S. Those that have the balls, check out the UFC and Pride. Then go to your local dojo and feel a bit of that need to be instead of need to have. It's simply refreshing.
Rating:
Summary: Only the intellectually clueless call it "Fascist."
Review: I cannot improve too much on the comments from the gentleman from California. It was a complex movie--a thinking person's movie--and the odd movement that sprung up within its context could hardly be characterized as excessively respectful of authority figures (the hallmark of fascism), or indeed of even society itself. Indeed, if you are foolish enough to judge Fight Club (the fictional Club in the Movie) in real-world terms, it was plainly message-driven rather than leader-driven: Some may recall the scene in which Cornelius nearly loses his manhood! I don't want to say any more; I've given away too much already. For those who want a wonderfully weird, HILARIOUSLY funny, bizarre, smart movie that disturbs you repeatedly but leaves you cheering in the end, I STRONGLY recommend "Fight Club"! Don't let curmudgeonly reviewers who cluelessly focus on ALL the WRONG things scare you off!
Rating:
Summary: Deeper than you'd think
Review: I came into this movie expecting a lot. Many friends had hyped it up saying that it was brilliant and violent. Violence? Yea it's violent, but it's not a bloody type of violence. It's a brutal and cruel sort of violence that reflects Tyler's (Brad Pitt) social commentary. There was lots of deep and dark philosophy tossed in there. Issues that were brought up (but not limited to): changing family structure, social construction of religion, existentialism, consumerism, modernism, etc. This movie essentially is a statement about the schizophrenia that modern life has inflicted upon us and makes us ask questions about how we want to live our lives. I highly recommend this movie.
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