Time has been cruel to Fight Club. When this propulsive masterpiece from David Fincher premiered at the 1999 Venice Film Festival it shocked audiences with the severity of its satire. Consumer culture was mercilessly pilloried, and in the disturbing portrayal of an unnamed narrator (Edward Norton) and the violent exploits of his impossibly handsome alter-ego Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) the film announced itself as a pitiless attack on male vanity and the delusions of male supremacy.<\/p>\n
Not for long. Copycat \u201creal fight clubs\u201d were immediately established in American and the UK, and Durden became an aspirational hero for an emerging cohort of frustrated males who were connecting and venting online and were soon known under the collective banner of \u201cthe manosphere\u201d. <\/p>\n
Pick-up artists parroted Durden\u2019s mottos (\u201cWe\u2019re a generation of men raised by women\u201d) and emulated his counter-cultural stance, while fitness-focused \u201csocial media personalities\u201d decried sensitivity and intelligence as the values of a beta male \u2014 \u201cHow\u2019s that working out for you, being clever?\u201d Durden hisses to the narrator. The manosphere, it seemed, didn\u2019t do irony.<\/p>\n
Now, though, Fight Club has returned in a gorgeous 4K restoration to remind us that it is, well, just a film. And what a film! Durden works, we discover early on, as an anarchic projectionist who re-splices reels of film to suit his recalcitrant whims. This movie, based on Chuck Palahniuk\u2019s novel, certainly, and very deliberately, feels as if Durden has been unleashed in the edit suite \u2014 the subliminal flashes of Pitt, in character, throughout are very cheeky. <\/p>\n
The pace is breathtaking, the throwaway set pieces (mid-air collision, anyone?) astounding, and the three central, much overlooked performances from Pitt, Norton and a revelatory Helena Bonham Carter are compelling. Bonham Carter\u2019s feckless, destabilising Marla is the secret weapon, a comedic tour de force but also the point of the movie.<\/p>\n
In the final act it is Marla (spoiler alert) who wakes the narrator from his toxic hallucination. There is only one thing superior to the manosphere, in other words. And that\u2019s women.
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15, 139min
On 4K UHD restoration and streaming<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Time has been cruel to Fight Club. When this propulsive masterpiece from David Fincher premiered at the 1999…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":600705,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[96,2839,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-600704","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-movies","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/600704","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=600704"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/600704\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/600705"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=600704"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=600704"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=600704"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}