Fight Club Movie Review Before anything else, lets get this out of the way.

Fight Club is a great film. It has a unique narrative that is supported by great writing. Every minute of the film is gripping and interesting. Its cast, specifically Brad Pitt, Edward Norton and Helena Bonham Carter, is simply phenomenal and the characters they portray are interesting and well characterized. The mood is well built through expert use of color and lighting and highlights the contrast between the narrator and Tyler Durden. All these great elements create a film who finds balance between character exploration and entertainment. But Fight Club is more than just a movie telling a story, Fight Club is a commentary on the materialistic world we live in. In a nutshell, Fight Club is a depiction of armed revolution against society. Fight Club questions and breaks all the rules that society has put before us. The entire film is seen through the eyes of an unnamed narrator. He is an ordinary dude working an 8 to 5 shit job that he hates only to be trapped in the vortex of materialism. He becomes a drone in an unending cycle of work and consumption all the while becoming a slave to capitalists. The narrator realizes this and becomes the symbol of the white collar middle class dissatisfaction of life and the decay of the middle class male. This passive dissatisfaction of the narrator becomes fuel for Tyler Durdens aggressive dissatisfaction. Slowly the passive narrator becomes more and more active as he and Tyler slip away from society and its norms. Tyler Durden then becomes the symbol for social revolution. To describe Tyler just imagine your typical middle aged man and totally reverse all of those traits, he is anti-pacifist, anti-individualist, anti-materialism and anti-capitalist. He does not conform to society but rather he questions society. He questions the assumptions and presumptions that society has indoctrinated to us and goes against the grain. But these sentiments are not confined to just Tyler Durden, he is simply a catalyst for the rest of societys unwanted children. Tyler, through Fight Club and Project Mayhem, becomes a stage in which people can express and act on these sentiments. Through Project Mayhem the film shows the power of collective resistance. The tiny people of society had a voice and became a force to be reckoned with. This dissatisfaction and anti-conformist ideologies became an acting entity through the masses. The film highlights class struggle through the collective people and portrays the armed struggle against society. But then, when all seems well and good, we learn, near the end of the film, that Tyler Durden is nothing more than a figment of the narrators imagination. The film then proceeds to a total and utter nosedive. Every single thing it has discussed from the beginning, all the antipacifist, anti-society and anti-capitalism themes are suddenly treated as nonsense or even, to an extent, demonic. All those ideologies become branded as simply part of the narrators psychological issues. All of a sudden all the good arguments that Tyler Durden presented in favor of these ideologies are dismissed as lunacy. But the thing that infuriates me the most about Fight Clubs ending is its main argument for dismissing the anti-society ideologies. Heres a simplified version of the endings argument against said ideologies: Tyler Durden presented and represented the anti-society ideologies

Tyler Durden is simply a figment of the narrators imagination/ a psychological issue Therefore the anti-society ideologies are invalid and or evil WHAT!? This argument, if it can even be called that, is nothing but blatant and shameful use of the Argumentum ad hominem fallacy. The thing is, it does not freaking matter who or what presented the arguments. It would not make a difference if it were satan or a talking monkey that presented the argument because an argument stands by its own merits, not by the merits of the person that proposed it. Yet the film relies on the ignorance of the people to this fallacy because it is the main counter argument it gives to dismiss the previously discussed ideologies, the only other major argument given was that this revolution caused destruction and the death of one person (which can as easily be said of its alternative). The idea that this flimsy argument was supposed topple all the good arguments Tyler Durden has previously put forward is laughable and yet that is exactly what happens and all the effort that the film took to establish good arguments for the ideologies in its first 2 hours ultimately goes to waste. People walk out of the theaters reaffirming rather than questioning the very ideas that the film attempts to oppose. All of this makes you wonder why the film even bothers to question society in the first place, only to contradict itself in the end. Why does the film break away from all of its ideals? Simple answer would be: to conform to the Hollywood standard. If it is so, is Fight Club then a testament to the power of Hollywood to influence films to conform to its ideals? Is the film a statement saying that even the most radical and most antiHollywood films will in the end get sucked in and bow down to the mighty Hollywood? That no film can ever be stronger than Hollywood? And that no matter how hard a film tries to break away from the Hollywood ideal it can never succeed once it steps into enemy territory? The answer, my friends, is yes.