Fight Club isn't a bad movie, but it's not nearly as good as people make it out to be.
It really comes off as a pretentious piece of work for film students to study to the point of exhaustion, but I don't think it was ever intended to be that. The movie plays out, with a few key alterations, as a scene-by-scene retelling of the book, sometimes going so far as to lift paragraphs of inner monologue directly from the novel and plopping them into the script.
It's a movie that requires at least two viewings but, beyond that, it gets boring in a pretty big hurry. Particularly toward the end of the second act/beginning of the third, it's so painfully bland and boring that it's difficult to care about anything that's happening at all (around the whole Project Mayhem stuff). It's difficult to maintain any kind of focus throughout.
There's a lot of stuff hidden in this movie for people to go back and revisit, too, but most of it is inessential. Honestly, having looked back at some of the Easter eggs, it leaves the question: who cares? And of course this is an unpopular opinion to have, but I held off on reviewing this title in the honest hopes that multiple viewings would raise the rating. I even read Palahniuk's novel to try to derive some additional meaning out of it.
Without giving away the ending, it makes you think, and it creates a nice gimmick to get people to watch it again but, as I said, beyond that I'm perfectly happy to close the chapter on this one and leave it in the past.
The first rule of fight club is that you don't talk about fight club. And I'm happy to be done talking about this one for a good long while.
It really comes off as a pretentious piece of work for film students to study to the point of exhaustion, but I don't think it was ever intended to be that. The movie plays out, with a few key alterations, as a scene-by-scene retelling of the book, sometimes going so far as to lift paragraphs of inner monologue directly from the novel and plopping them into the script.
It's a movie that requires at least two viewings but, beyond that, it gets boring in a pretty big hurry. Particularly toward the end of the second act/beginning of the third, it's so painfully bland and boring that it's difficult to care about anything that's happening at all (around the whole Project Mayhem stuff). It's difficult to maintain any kind of focus throughout.
There's a lot of stuff hidden in this movie for people to go back and revisit, too, but most of it is inessential. Honestly, having looked back at some of the Easter eggs, it leaves the question: who cares? And of course this is an unpopular opinion to have, but I held off on reviewing this title in the honest hopes that multiple viewings would raise the rating. I even read Palahniuk's novel to try to derive some additional meaning out of it.
Without giving away the ending, it makes you think, and it creates a nice gimmick to get people to watch it again but, as I said, beyond that I'm perfectly happy to close the chapter on this one and leave it in the past.
The first rule of fight club is that you don't talk about fight club. And I'm happy to be done talking about this one for a good long while.