Fight Club 4K UHD Review

Fight Club dismantles both reckless masculinity and runaway consumerism from the perspective of a decade that gave us the rebellion of Rage Against the Machine, which alongside Fight Club and The Matrix served as the final bosses of 1990s societal angst, flipping the decade from the flashy wealth of the 1980s, into the cascading after-effects of that economic bubble.

It’s a fascinating movie to watch in that it flawlessly captures the mundane modern corporate life, spiraling employees into depression as they set aside morals to preserve profit. So it goes for Fight Club’s narrator Edward Norton, who spends his days making calculations as to whether seeing someone fused to their seat of their burned out car necessitates a recall. It doesn’t, usually. Recalls are expensive.

Fight Club is a bleak tragedy about our inability to openly show emotion

Norton is a mere narrator through this story, and with needs so great, he hops from one support group to another just for a chance to connect. Fight Club is a bleak tragedy about our inability to openly show emotion, empathy, and emptiness, but doing everything we can to avoid showing those basic feelings. So, Norton joins an underground fighting ring, where punching people in the face makes him feel like he belongs among other men.

Making its initial theatrical run in 1999, Fight Club’s focus on social issues – isolation, traditional masculinity, all tied to runaway consumerism – came before social media or widespread internet, two things that appear to have exasperated those problems to a degree not even Fight Club could predict. Now in the era of YouTube influences, Tyler Durden’s (Brad Pitt) speech to men willing to spend their weeknights punching one another, sounds familiar: “I see in Fight Club the strongest and smartest men who ever lived.” It’s what they’re told to be, and that’s what a man is expected to be. To not be that is isolating. Fight Club draws direct ties to weakened men who find themselves in violence and the need to purchase things, because engaging in either case gives a sense of belonging. Both merely dress our sense of control in our society, and use the same tactics to do so.

There’s darkened comedy watching Norton return home every night to a house so dangerous and rotting, the electricity needs shut off when it rains. There’s nothing but filth, but he’s faking a smile while slamming a bowl of cereal from a cracked piece of cheap tupperware. That’s what real men do, you see – live in squalor, eat how/what they want, and fight. That’s belonging, control, power, and a path to anarchy, literally anything except just admitting to loneliness. Because that’s not what men do.

Incredible shadows highlight this presentation. The perfect blacks reach spectacular depths and density. Fight Club is a disc worth using to test a display’s ability to render black levels. The lighting never looked better, or made more of a statement at home. Dolby Vision works over the contrast too, brightness intense and pure.

A pleasing grain structure is preserved, clean and generally natural. This leads to exceptionally firm, elegant amounts of texture. Facial detail looks splendid, richly resolved by this 4K scan Note Helena Bonham Carter face is often smoothed intentionally, but it’s not without texture). The print itself is spotless. However, fantastic as the pores and hair and clothes textures look, there is an unavoidable layer of sharpening visible. Halos do happen, and while uncommon, they do show on high contrast edges. The rest of Fight Club looks rugged, although that does visually pair well to the themes.

Other than flesh tones and their warmth, Fight Club skews toward the cold. It’s uncomfortable and abrasive, which again, suits the style and aesthetics.

Surrounded by ambiance, the DTS-HD 5.1 mix is active and constant. Outdoors, the city audibly comes alive. Trains, cars, sirens, and chatter keep a constant wall of sound going unimpeded. I’ve never heard a movie laundromat sound more realistic than the one does in Fight Club. Seems small, minor even, but it’s important to the consistency of bringing Fight Club life.

When utilized, the low-end is powerful. Bob’s footsteps, a garage door opening, and up into the explosion, plane crash, car crash, or music, the pure loudness of those moments showcase the range. Potent doesn’t cover the half of it; Fight Club is a monster audio disc, if not in the traditional sense of blockbuster action flicks, but of raw sound design, as it tends to be with Fincher’s work.

All of the 2009 Blu-ray extras are here (as is the Blu-ray as a whole), and the three commentaries jump over to the UHD too. Director David Fincher is first, and pops over to the second track tom join Brad Pitt, Edward Norton, Helena Bonham Carter, and writers Chuck Palahniuk and Jim Uhls. The third track is production designer Alex McDowell, cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth, costume designer Michael Kaplan, and VE supervisor Kevin Haug. A few featurettes, galleries, deleted scenes, and promo materials finish up.