Underplayed Gems

Fight Club (1999)

Fight Club poster
Directed by
David Fincher
Written by
Chuck Palahniuk, Jim Uhls
Cast
Edward Norton, Brad Pitt, Helena Bonham Carter, Jared Leto, Meat Loaf, Zach Grenier, David Lee Smith, Eion Bailey
Genre
drama film, psychological thriller, thriller film, flashback film
Country
Germany, United States
Runtime
2h 19m
Rated
R
Rating
8.4 of 10 from 32,351 voters
Elsewhere
IMDb
The 3D catalogue: film cases on wooden shelves, with the cat sitting at the counter next to its greeting.

The catalogue in 3D

The film shelves have a room of their own that you can walk around in. The cat behind the counter is the AI Catbot, and they pick real films from the same catalogue when you tell them what you feel like watching. Nothing is for sale, here or in there. Go in from here and this film is already out on the counter, with more like it waiting on the shelf next to it.

More films like thisWatch the trailer

or watch the trailer on YouTube

How it feels

A dissatisfied white-collar worker forms an underground fight club with a charismatic soap salesman. Their bond spirals into something destructive and much bigger than either man expected.

unsettlingbleakdarkly comictensecerebralsubversivevisceralsardonic

What happens

Fight Club is a 1999 American film directed by David Fincher and starring Brad Pitt, Edward Norton, and Helena Bonham Carter. It is based on the 1996 novel Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk. Norton plays the unnamed narrator, who is discontented with his white-collar job. He forms a "fight club" with a soap salesman, Tyler Durden (Pitt) and becomes embroiled with an impoverished but beguiling woman, Marla Singer (Bonham Carter). Palahniuk's novel was optioned by Fox 2000 Pictures producer Laura Ziskin, who hired Uhls to write the film adaptation. Fincher was selected because of his enthusiasm for the story. He developed the script with Uhls and sought screenwriting advice from the cast and others in the film industry. It was filmed in and around Los Angeles from July to December 1998. He and the cast compared the film to Rebel Without a Cause (1955) and The Graduate (1967), with a theme of conflict between Generation X and the value system of advertising. Studio executives did not like the film and restructured Fincher's intended marketing campaign to try to reduce anticipated losses. Fight Club premiered at the 56th Venice International Film Festival on September 10, 1999, and was released in the United States on October 15, 1999, by 20th Century Fox. The film failed to meet the studio's expectations at the box office and polarized critics. It was ranked as one of the most controversial and talked-about films of the 1990s. However, Fight Club later found commercial success with its home video release, establishing it as a cult classic and causing media to revisit the film. In 2009, on its tenth anniversary, The New York Times dubbed it the "defining cult movie of our time". (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

More like this

This page is from Underplayed Gems. Not quite it? You can browse by genre, country and year, or take this one into the 3D catalogue and ask the Catbot for something closer.