A Must See Movie: Fight Club
If you haven’t seen it yet, Fight Club was, in fact, one of the most culturally and artistically important films of the last ten or twenty years. Just as movies like Pulp Fiction and Goodfellas started the decade off with a bang, Fight Club finished it off with an even bigger one. It’s definitely one of the must download movies of the last thirty years or so.
The movie follows Ed Norton as an unnamed narrator who serves as our lead character. He’s a white collar office worker dissatisfied with his lot in life, and the movie draws a lot of comparisons to Office Space which came out around the same time. The two films are very different, however. They use much of the same subject matter, but Fight Club is much darker, much more brooding, while at the same time… Just as funny, albeit in a darker, more sarcastic sort of way.
He meets two people who change his life, Tyler Durden, and a new woman played by Helena Bonham Carter. Durden, played by Brad Pitt, is an unusual character, completely unbound by societal rules. Think of Kramer from Seinfeld. Now imagine if Kramer wanted to lead a violent revolution. There you have Tyler Durden.
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 way it ties everything up is fascinating and was, at the time, an incredible and unpredictable plot twist. Since, it’s become sort of cliche. This movie and the Sixth Sense both created their own style of “surprise endings”, and created trends that would eventually get a little tired but which, at the time, were exciting and interesting.
Norton quickly skyrocketed in fame with this movie, proving that he could take some really exciting projects and make the most of them. Since, his career has had a lot of ups and downs, with a cool, edgy flick one year, and some weak box office bait the next. This is one of his best, though, and the same goes for Brad Pitt.
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.
Companies like Apple, release movies to rent online the same day they are released for DVD purchase. Movie Cast List Many websites that allow you to download movies for free may contain malware or viruses so it’s important to use caution. I can hook my computer up to my big screen TV to watch movies online.
