Opens October 15, 1999

When you go to see Fight Club -- and you probably will -- be prepared for a ride, although not necessarily a wholly enlightening one. From the word go, the film assaults the senses with its technical hoola- hoops, so much so that sometimes you're left having to dig for the emotional content. It's a movie about which most people will feel highly ambivalent. Whatever the case, it's can't be easily dismissed because it speaks -- or at least attempts to speak -- to a chilling diaspora in modern society, indicting our crippling consumerist culture while begging men to reclaim their manhood through violence and anarchy. As the film's anti-hero Tyler Durden extols, "It's only after we've lost everything that we are free to do anything."

Fight Club exists in the same sordid, desperate world as director David Fincher's previous hit Seven. Fincher is once again at home in a bleak, anonymous universe where people exist rather than truly live. His moody direction is one of the most potent elements of the film, giving the movie its soul or, perhaps, its lack thereof. The film's hero, who calls himself Jack (Edward Norton), is a drowning man caught in the droning workaday, white-collar lifestyle. His empty soul would be at home in T.S. Elliot's poems "The Wasteland" and "The Hollow Men." And in his spare time? He buys stuff like an Ikea sofa or a "Ying Yang"-shaped coffee table. (Indeed, the decorating of his apartment is captured with surprising whimsy by Fincher.) This is what the modern world has reduced us to, as Tyler explains later. "We are by-products of a lifestyle obsession."

Into Jack's nihilistic universe walks Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt). Tyler is everything that Jack is not. Strong, sexual, focused. When Jack's apartment blows up -- literally -- Tyler takes him in and so, in the best Joseph Campbell-ian terms, the mythic journey begins. After getting drunk at a bar, Tyler and Jack evolve the idea of Fight Club, a weekly group of men who gather to -- quite simply -- beat the crap out of each other. As shot by Fincher and cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth, these sequences have a poetry all their own, equating fighting with sex, the final blow raining down in orgasmic splendor. Pain is pure; pain is real. As Jack says in his omnipresent (and sometimes tiresome) voice-over, for each man in the fights "he was a god for ten minutes."

As Fight Club escalates, Tyler becomes an almost Herculean figure to men everywhere, recruiting them to the next level: "Project Mayhem." From here, it's unfair to reveal much more. Tyler's ubiquitous warning to his fighters -- "The first rule of Fight Club is never talk about Fight Club" -- might well apply to the plot itself. Like The Crying Game and The Sixth Sense, Fight Club relies on a third act reveal that spins the story in a wildly new direction.

Now, there's a lot of potentially provocative stuff going on in here: The emasculation and re-empowerment of modern man, who Tyler refers to as "God's unwanted children"; the inference that the Twentieth Century has taken away our souls; the perception that violence makes us free. Many people will chant that this is irresponsible film making. Yet, it tries -- tries -- to be the opposite. Fincher clearly wants us to question our beliefs, to examine where our world has taken us. In the hands of writer Jim Uhls, who has faithfully adapted Chuck Palahniuk's book, the script is reasonably successful, using inspired humor and raw invective to jar us into thinking or simply to entertain.

Where the film goes wrong is in its inability to define its message. It is often so caught up in being edgy and clever, that real philosophy eventually gets sacrificed. Consumerism and loss of masculinity somehow get oddly equated as Fight Club's controlled freedom-through-violence transforms into a recipe for social mayhem. There's also a rather interesting issue raised by the absence of women in this film. There's only one, Marla (Helena Bonham Carter), whose madonna-whore has little to do with the core story.

While this is by definition a "guy's movie", one can only wonder where women fit into this world. Are they not just as confused by their identities, as caught up in role models that no longer make sense? Don't they feel the same social alienation and hollow obsession with ownership? From novelist Palahniuk's point of view, it seems that there is no room for the same anger and emptiness in the female psyche, thus making this film feel a bit one-sided and testosterone-ridden. Granted, guys -- especially the "Maxim" magazine crowd -- may get a charge out of it, but women will probably leave feeling ignored.

Ultimately, Fight Club neither succeeds nor fails. But, with all its problems, it does achieve something that many films never do. It gets people talking. It makes them ask where their lives are taking them. It is also an exceptionally well-made film. Fincher went the big budget route here and didn't skimp on inventive and often shocking camera work, which creates a dream-like hyper reality. Writer Uhls captured the nihilistic tone of the book to perfection and the actors have immersed themselves into this world completely. Whether you agree with the message, Fight Club is an elegant piece of film making that tries to show us that one's life path isn't immutable, that we can change our destiny if we'll only question it first.