David Fincher: Ranking His Movies From Worst To Best

4. Fight Club (1999)

Controversial upon its release, Fight Club is now not only a favorite of its generation, it€™s practically required viewing for anyone with a passing interest in film. This film, more than any of Fincher€™s others, seems to spark the most debates and has the fiercest defenders, while also remaining one of the most misunderstood. The film itself is a parable about unchecked masculinity in the modern world. On one hand, asserting oneself and breaking away from the status quo is celebrated. But by the end of the film, we see how bad things can get when every roadblock is removed and chaos begins to reign. Fight Club is as cerebral as it is violent, often delving deep into the Narrator€™s (Ed Norton) head to explore his feelings of disconnection and lack of satisfaction with his modern life at the outset of the film. Enter Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), a mentor who can seemingly do anything without consequence, who soon liberates the Narrator from the banality of his current existence by forming Fight Club, a place for frustrated men to vent and blow off steam via hand to hand combat. Fight Club may be Fincher€™s most stylized film, and while at times that style can be a bit distracting, for the most part it works in putting us (often literally) in the mind of his main character. We see and feel everything as our Narrator does, which becomes more and more important as the film rolls on. If there€™s a problem with Fight Club, it comes from the interpretations of the film rather than the product itself. The fact that Fight Club looks cool, that it seems alluring to us, is a necessity. For the majority of male viewers, it should look enticing; it€™s supposed to function as an ultimate male fantasy for some of our most base desires. The problem, of course, is with viewers who don€™t connect that initial allure to the ultimate evil that it becomes when it transforms into Project Mayhem. As different as the two are (the second being essentially a militant extremist group), they are inextricably linked together. Those who only see the idea of a Fight Club as a positive, as a fantasy, are missing the point. What Fight Club does is show us how taking out too many of the stop guards and roadblocks that society has created for us can be liberating, but also dangerous. Fight Club is a fascinating film because of how it explores both sides of that truth, without ever drawing a specific line on where one turns into the other.