Fight Club

(1999) dir. David Fincher

It didn’t even take any growing up for me to despise Fight Club – I hated it the first time I saw it on video a few years after it came out. But people loved that movie so much, and I just didn’t get it. The writing is so awful, and the voice-over narration just pissed me off. When I found out that a lot of the script was lifted directly from the book of the same name, I vowed never to read anything by Chuck Palahniuk, and I’ve stuck to that. From my perspective now, I understand that Fight Club is overrated because its themes of alienation and existential angst experienced by young people have been articulated time and time again in far more subtle, interesting ways by any number of films, including even other Fincher works like the underrated The Game (1997), with Michael Douglas and Sean Penn.