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Well, it's shocking, funny, dynamic, unforgettable, queasy and original. As with Trainspotting three years ago, David Fincher's latest film burrows deep into your subconscious and stays there.
Long after most of the year's releases are collecting dust on the video shelves of the world, Fight Club will still be there, lying dormant in your brain, just waiting for someone to trigger off the collective memory of this grimy, hyper-stunning tale.
Edward Norton is Jack, the narrator who, as the story opens, is an insomniac suffering from life in the late 20th century. He exists to collect more must have items from the IKEA catalogue and achieve a nirvana like completeness.
In an attempt to find some sort of feeling in his vaccuum of a life, he starts attending support groups for men with testicular cancer, tuberculosis and the like. Finding comfort in the "bitch tits" of Robert Paulson (Meat Loaf), our hero cries his heart out and realises he is still alive after all.
Like our narrator, Marla is a tourist. A strung-out harpy of a woman who seeks some meaning to her own meaningless existence.
Jack cannot feel happiness while he is aware that there is another imposter in the room so they reach a deal and a bizarre relationship constructed of mutual respect for one another's bizarre interest.
When Jack meets Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) on a flight, his life is turned upside down by the soap salesman with a bizarre dress sense.
The besuited hero goes back to his apartment to find the place has been gutted by a gas explosion and so in a fit of desperation, Jack rings Durden.
Before long the two men are living together in one of the most decrepit houses ever seen in a major motion picture. This makes The Bradbury in Blade Runner look like Mimi Rogers' apartment in Someone To Watch Over Me.
One night they start clashing in a bar forecourt - no malice in these fisticuffs though. Just the affirmation that both men are alive in a world where consumerism has taken precedence over feeling.
The scuffle leads to the eponymous organisation, an underground arena for businessmen, blue collar workers and the like to beat the crap out of each other and feel good about it.
Jack starts turning up at work with bruises and the sort of manner that marks him out as a man to be avoided. He starts dressing down, bleeding onto his collar and sporting gashes that make his colleagues back away in fear.
And so it goes. Fight Club spreads...
The first hour of the movie leads you down one straight, dimly lit path, brilliantly executed with living catalogues creating themselves from thin air, close-ups of gas cookers releasing their invisible cargo to a doom-laden room and just the sort of eye-catching visuals that has made Fincher one of the best directors of his generation.
What did it mean to me? Well, like one of the disillusioned masses that seeks solace in the comfort of pre-packaged food, franchise furniture stores and mind numbing TV, this is an epiphany of a film. A jet black comedy that left me feeling sick and in a state of altered consciousness - if you're driving home from the movies afterwards, you may need time to collect your thoughts as this is not one of the movies where you just go and get a burger afterwards, having forgotten the plot by the time you get to the counter.
Ironically, Fincher's visuals will be lifted by the very companies he is taking the piss out of over the next few years and this thorn in the side of the moral majority will achieve cult status on video - after all, everyone will want to freeze frame the subliminal moments when both Tyler and Marla appear.
However, if you get the chance, catch this on the big screen with a decent sound system and an open mind.
Although the actual bone-splintering fight scenes will leave you felling sick, this is not a movie about fighting. It's a film in which the disillusioned masses, born in a generation of TV and video games without soul, try to make sense of a plastic culture.
Even if it means losing their minds in order to do so.
© 1999 Roger Crow
