Fight Club (R)
20th Century Studios; A.V. Club; IMDb; Regency; Rotten Tomatoes; TV Tropes; WAW; Wikia; Wikipedia
streaming sites: Google Play; Hulu; Movies Anywhere; Vudu; YouTube

Caution: various sites I link to above spoil a major plot twist, which I won't do here.

This movie came out in 1999, but I somehow managed not to see it until 2024. It's based on a book I haven't read. Of course, the line "The first rule of fight club is you do not talk about fight club" is pretty well-known, so before I watched the movie I thought maybe, just for fun, I'd leave my "review" completely blank, except for the title and the links. Well, I'm not going to do that, but I'm also not going to divulge too much of the plot. Because I'm kind of upset. Somehow, I'm pretty sure I avoided ever learning about the plot twist that comes late in the movie (or if I did learn of it, I'd completely forgotten about it by the time I watched the movie). But it's a twist I guessed at fairly early in the movie. And throughout the movie, there were subtle hints about the plot twist, but also there were countless things that happened in the movie that made me think the twist I had guessed would be impossible. So every time I saw a hint that I was right, it bugged me. And when the movie finally got to the twist and it turned out my guess was right... the movie did little if anything to make me believe it was possible, after all. I still say it wasn't. So that makes me very conflicted about the movie as a whole.

So, what can I say about the plot? Well, the main character's name is never actually revealed, but he narrates the film. The Narrator (Edward Norton) is dissatisfied with his life, and he has insomnia. So he starts attending support groups for various illnesses he doesn't have, using aliases. After awhile, he starts seeing a woman named Marla Singer (Helena Bonham Carter) attending many of the same meetings, and realizes she's a faker, just like himself. And that disturbs the peace he had found in those meetings, which had apparently cured his insomnia, but now he becomes sleepless again. So he confronts Marla, and they work out a schedule for each of them to attend different meetings, so they wouldn't have to ever see each other again. (But of course, they would end up seeing each other off and on throughout the film.) Soon thereafter, the Narrator meets a man named Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt). Incidentally, I want to mention that throughout much of the film, I thought his last name was "Dirty", which I found... I dunno, either appropriate or ironic or something, because one of his odd jobs was selling soap he made himself. But that doesn't matter, because I misheard his name.

Anyway, a fire destroys the Narrator's apartment and all his stuff. So he calls Tyler, who takes him out for drinks, and then invites the Narrator to stay at his place. Also, he wants the Narrator to fight him. Thus, fight club is born. It soon attracts lots of new members, because apparently a lot of men find some sort of catharsis not only in beating up other men, but getting badly beaten, themselves. (Personally I don't understand the appeal of either side of fighting.) The Narrator starts sleeping again, so abandons the support groups, as he no longer needs them. But things start to escalate to a level that I'm not going to spoil. And no, that's not the really major plot twist. That comes much later. The Narrator is not pleased with how far Tyler takes things, but his efforts to put a stop to it run into a seemingly insurmountable obstacle... which is the major spoiler.

That's all I want to say about the plot, and it's actually a good bit more than I intended to say. Lots of people have analyzed and interpreted the film in various ways, to the point that I could almost see fit to put my review under "art films", but not quite. Really, I think of all the categories I have on my site, "weird movies" works best. Not perfect, but close enough. I myself don't want to engage in any deep analysis of the movie. I rarely do that kind of thing anyway, but I usually at least wish I could. In this case, I really don't want to. I can appreciate the film on some metaphorical level, I guess. I don't think it's a bad film, and I'm glad I've finally seen it. But even setting aside the fact that I wanted to be wrong about the plot twist (which actually, my feelings are more mixed about than I've indicated)... the movie really isn't my cup of tea. For any number of reasons. But mostly that's surface-level stuff. I don't always like to think more deeply about movies than the surface level, but for this one... digging below the surface is the only thing that makes the movie remotely palatable. Even so... I'm not gonna do it. I'm glad others have, though.