Fight Club (1999): Yell! Magazine’s Greatest Films Series

Fight Club review:

By now, most everybody who’s going to see Fight Club has seen it. But as one of the greatest films of our time, it deserves a place on Yell! Magazine.

David Fincher and Jim Uhls adapted the highly successful Chuck Palahniuk novel of the same name to create one of the greatest films in Hollywood history. Starring Ed Norton and Brad Pitt, with a scene-stealing performance from musician Meatloaf, Fight Club is a violently beautiful and extremely dark film that journey’s into the mind of one seriously fucked up individual.

Fight Club trailer:

Tyler Durden, the film’s central character, leads a group of outcasts into an underground world where people beat on one another just to release the aggression they’ve built up inside them from a world that has somehow labeled them unfit for participation. The fights aren’t for money or fame, but rather self-satisfaction and self-worth. Fight Club‘s innate malaise is accentuated by Fincher’s penchant for dark and claustrophobic filmmaking.

Even if you include Norton’s mastery of the acting craft or Pitts character, Fight Club is brilliant more for its direction and climatic surprise ending than anything the actors bring to the table. David Fincher became one of Hollywood’s greatest directors for this film, which was a feat considering directed Se7en just a couple years earlier.