It’s amazing to think that it was a full 10 years ago that Fight Club first hit cinemas and was pretty much completely ignored by audiences. The film tanked hideously at the box office, but over the years its reputation has grown and grown, until it’s now sitting at number 17 on IMDB’s Top 250 and is on many people’s favourite films ever list. In fact it’s a good job they made it when they did, because Fight Club would never have gone before the cameras after 9/11.
It is a brilliant film, and I’m so glad I did manage to seen it in cinemas, where it was an astonishingly visceral experience. It’s never quite been the same on DVD, but the Blu-ray brings back much of the wince-inducing sounds and the truly wonderful level of visual detail and imagination. You’ll also be pleased to know that while the UK cinema and initial DVD release cut out a couple of seconds of angel face’s beating – which always struck me as immensely stupid, seeing as it robbed the film of one of its most pivotal moments where the entire moral viewpoint of the movie shifts – this Blu-ray, like the Definitive Edition, features the uncut version of the film.
While a lot of people run around revelling in the film’s anti-capitalist message, and many film critics accused it of being a fascist glorification of violence and nihilism, I can’t help feeling a lot of people kind of missed the point with Fight Club. The film isn’t ultimately backing Tyler Durden’s campaign, it’s showing why the disenfranchised are drawn into destructive organisations that seem to offer them hope and something to believe in, and which speaks to their frustrations. In Fight Club it’s men who’ve lacked male role models and don’t know how relate to women (other than their mothers), and are stuck in dead end jobs where they feel emasculated, who are drawn into something that offers them a family, male bonding and a chance to feel like they’re sticking two fingers up to a society they think has let them down by promising a lot and delivering very little.
Durden speaks to what these men have secretly always felt and becomes a sort of cult leader to them, who seems to have the answers. But if you actually look at it, and the film doesn’t really try to hide it, Durden really doesn’t have that much to offer. ‘Jack’ doesn’t try to stop him at the end because he’s a killjoy, but because he realises the pointlessness of what Tyler is espousing. Durden leads an organisation based purely on destruction, with no idea what he wants to replace the society he sets out to destroy with.
What his organisation goes out and does is essentially meaningless and won’t make the slightest difference, other than to make those involved in the terrorism feel better about themselves (or end up dead, like Bob). He’s basically tickling the problem’s feet, with no insight into how to really change anything. Durden is just finding an outlet for his frustrations, and getting others who feel like him to come along for the ride, rather than offering any genuine answers. It is a corruption of anarchy, and even Tyler’s grand plan at the end to blow up credit companies is a schoolboy fantasy, as the idea that it’ll make any difference whatsoever is almost nonsensical.
The reason some take it to be promoting Tyler’s views is that rather than going down the normal route and from the beginning signposting that what Durden is doing is wrong, Fight Club really wants you to understand the attraction of this sort of thing, instead of the default film position of getting the audience to sit in moral superiority over it. It wants you to see that people joining gangs, underground organisations and even terrorist groups don’t sign up because they’re inherently evil people, but because these groups offer something these people lack elsewhere. During the course of the film it takes you to a place where as a viewer you’re meant to feel like you’d want to join up, before showing you the reality and pointlessness behind the bravado and pop philosophy.
Anyway, that’s my take. If you still want to join a fight club, that’s your business.
As for the Blu-ray, few people will be complaining. David Fincher really likes to go to town on his home entertainment releases (for my money, while Panic Room wasn’t a great film, the three-disc Special Edition is still one of the best DVD releases ever – it’s virtually a film school on disc). In 2000, Fight Club was one of the finest DVD releases the format had had so far, but inevitably it doesn’t quite have the same impact today.
Most of the special features from the DVD release are included here, including the trailers, faux PSAs and commentaries, along with the excellent behind-the-scenes featurettes, which look at various moments from the film and offer commentary from numerous members of the crew so you can see how things like the special effects and shooting happened, with multiple angle and audio options to give you a full view into the making of the movie.
There are also a few new extras. The main one is ‘A Hit In The Ear’, which uses the technology of Blu-ray to take into the world of Fight Club sound designer Ken Klyce and allows you to remix the sound on several scenes. It’s a fascinating, interactive look into an underappreciated aspect of filmmaking, allowing you to see quite how complex creating the audio of a movie is, and how many layers and decisions go into the way you aurally experience a movie.
There’s also ‘Flogging Fight Club’, which is footage from the Guy’s Choice Awards a couple of years ago, where the movie was given a statuette for being sufficiently manly. It’s worth a look, particularly to hear Norton, Pitt and David Fincher reading some of the hideous and completely stupid reviews the film initially got, where it seems the reviewers didn’t even properly watch the film.
Also worth mentioning is the ‘Insomnia Mode’, which gives you an index of topic covered in the film, so you can jump anything you’re particularly interested in. However the best part of this is that as you’re unlikely to ever listen to all four audio commentaries, it gives you the option to have text on screen showing what each commentary is talking about at any one time, so you can jump between them or the original audio if something sounds particularly interesting.
However while the features are good, it’s the sound and visuals that most people will be interested with this Blu-ray release. As I mentioned before, Fincher is really keen on his home ent. releases, and while many directors only really pay attention to the extras, the Fight Club helmer is just as interested in how the film itself looks and sounds in the home. He realises that the way the sounds and visuals are mixed for the cinema, don’t necessarily translate perfectly to the home environment, so on many of his films, he hasn’t merely just taken the cinema release and shoved it on a disc, but really thought about how it should look and sound on digital disc and adjusted it accordingly.
The result is a brand new HD transfer which Fincher has supervised step-by-step, not just to ensure fantastic clarity, but also that the colours are balanced correctly and that it looks exactly the way it should do in BD, rather than just being an approximation based on what was done for the cinema release. It is a beautiful picture and really shows off what visually has to be one of the most impressive movies ever made. It great to look at, with superb contrast across the film’s pools of harsh white light and gloomy shadows, all newly balanced to ensure you see everything exactly as you’re meant to. There is a tiny bit of grain, which you’d expect for a 10-year-old film, but it’s certainly not distracting and actually adds the dirty feel of the film.
Likewise the audio has been remixed in order take full advantage of the home cinema set-up. One of the big problems with both DVD and Blu-ray releases is that generally they take the surround mix for the cinema, which of course is designed for a massive room filled with lots of people, and dump it onto a disc designed to be seen by a few people in a much smaller room. It means that many DVD and BD surround tracks aren’t half of what they’re meant to, with certain elements seeming overloaded in a living room environment, while other aspects of the mix virtually disappear, but that’s remedied here with a fantastic DTS-HD remix.
It’s particularly important for Fight Club, where the visceral and rather horrific sounds of the fights were rather dulled on DVD (in the cinema it was the sounds rather than the visuals that made you wince), but here it’s taken back to what it should be. You also get plenty of floor-shuddering bass for your buck, but which doesn’t overwhelm things as it sometimes often does on other releases.
It’s an excellent release, and one all Fight Club fans should invest in. Visually and aurally it’s one of the most dynamic films ever made (not to mention the truly glorious screenplay), and while it was good to look at on DVD, on Blu-ray it’s absolutely wonderful. A few shots may not be quite up to par with the rest (the shots in the support groups don’t have the same clarity as the rest, for example), but any problems are minor compared to the disc’s successes.
Overall Verdict: Despite the early negative reviews, Fight Club is a truly fantastic film, which looks and sounds better than ever on Blu-ray.
Special Features:
‘A Hit in The Ear: Ren Klyce and the Sound Design of Fight Club’ Welcome To Fight Club; Angel Faces Beating; The Crash; Tyler’s Goodbye
‘Flogging Fight Club’ Featurette
Insomniac Mode: I Am Jack’s Search Index, Commentary Log, Topic Search
Behind-The-Scenes Featurettes with multiple commentaries
Edward Norton Text Interview
Commentary by David Fincher
Commentary by David Fincher, Brad Pitt, Edward Norton and Helena Bonham Carter
Commentary by Chuck Palahniuk and Jim Uhls
Commentary by Alex McDowell, Jeff Cronenweth, Michael Kaplan and Kevin Haug
Seven Deleted Scenes and Alternate Scenes
Trailers & TV Spots
Public Service Announcements
Music Video
Promotional Gallery
Art Gallery
Reviewer: Tim Isaac
