Fight Club Review

Fincher shoots corporate America the way other directors shoot crime scenes: sodium-lit, sickly green, every surface faintly damp. The furniture catalogue overlay and the single-serving-friend montage establish the comic register early, which matters, because the film is far funnier than its reputation allows. Edward Norton plays the narrator as a man narrating his own insomnia, and Brad Pitt plays Tyler as pure projection, all cigarette burns and pressed thrift-store suits.

Jim Uhls's script is quotable to a fault, and the advertising cadence of the rules and the soap monologue is exactly why the movie escaped its own irony and got adopted by the people it was mocking. Technically it is a showcase: subliminal Tyler frames spliced into early scenes, impossible camera moves through a trash can and out of a gun barrel, the Dust Brothers grinding underneath. The last act is where it strains, because once the twist lands the film has to explain itself and Project Mayhem's escalation turns schematic. Still a formal high point of the decade and Fincher's cleanest fusion of style and joke.