Fight Club (Rental) (1999)

This review is sponsored by

BUY IT

General		Extras
Category	Drama	Theatrical Trailer
Rating
Year Of Production	1999
Running Time	133:25
RSDL / Flipper	RSDL (64:52)	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Menu
Region Coding	4	Directed By	David Fincher
Studio Distributor	Twentieth Century Fox	Starring	Brad Pitt Edward Norton Helena Bonham Carter Meat Loaf Jared Leto
Case	Amaray-Transparent
RPI	Rental	Music	Michael Simpson John King

Video		Audio
Pan & Scan/Full Frame	None	English Dolby Digital 5.1 (384Kb/s)
Widescreen Aspect Ratio	2.35:1
16x9 Enhancement
Video Format	576i (PAL)
Original Aspect Ratio	2.35:1	Miscellaneous
Jacket Pictures	No
Subtitles	English	Smoking	Yes
		Annoying Product Placement	No
		Action In or After Credits	No

    Edward Norton plays Jack, an insomniac who is addicted to catalogues (especially Ikea catalogues) who has created his perfect apartment. Unfortunately, this does not fill the emptiness of his life. He finds relief from his insomnia when he starts attending support groups for people with terminal illnesses, such as testicular cancer, blood parasites and tuberculosis. Waddle, Waddle, Slide! He, of course, does not suffer from any of these illnesses, but goes along anyway. Everything is wonderful until Marla Singer (Helena Bonham Carter) starts turning up to these support group meetings. She is a faker, like Jack. I found Helena Bonham Carter's performance excellent, and one of this movie's highlights for me. Jack cannot enjoy the meetings whilst she is there, as it reminds him that he is a faker, too. So, they come to an arrangement where they split up the support groups so that they won't bump into each other, but this is not the last we see of Marla, believe me!

    Jack then meets Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), a soap salesman who has stopped being a consumer and is into the rawer experiences of life. The two become friends and one night the two get into a friendly bare-fist fight, just to see what it would be like, as neither have been in one before. They find the experience so profound that they continue the fights each week. Soon, other people want to fight them and so Fight Club is born. The story evolves from here, so I am going to stop my plot synopsis at this point.

Video

    The picture is extremely clear and sharp at all times. The colour and skin tones are perfect. David Fincher has deliberately used a muted colour pallet in many scenes to enhance the movie's mood. There is no low-level noise, edge bleeding or edge enhancement.

    Shadow detail is excellent when it is meant to be present. There are many dark scenes in this movie, all of which look naturally dark, with some areas being pitch black with no shadow detail, and other areas of the image containing excellent amounts of detail. Overall, Fight Club presents a very nice balance of black, unlike the previously-reviewed End Of Days.

    Pixelization and graininess was impressively absent, and apart from some trivial solarization in the smoke in the opening credits (around the writing), no other MPEG artefacts were seen.

    I cannot remember seeing one single instance of aliasing. No film artefacts were noticed either, but there could have been the odd one or two small ones, which tend to slip by unnoticed when you are actually watching the movie, as I was doing.

    This is an RSDL disc, with the layer change occurring in Chapter 19, at 64:52. There was only a very slight pause, which was not at all disruptive to the flow of the movie. This is an excellently placed layer change.

Video Ratings Summary

Sharpness
Shadow Detail
Colour
Grain/Pixelization
Film-To-Video Artefacts
Film Artefacts
Overall

Audio

    The dialogue was clear and easy to understand throughout the entire movie, even during scenes that had high ambient background noise. There are a couple of trivial instances of dialogue replacement but they are not of any real significance.

    I had to stop playing and restart on two occasions to rectify drifting audio sync, however, this is not a disc audio sync problem, it is a problem with the particular firmware version in my Sony DVD player. This problem happens so rarely I have not bothered to seek an upgrade yet...maybe it is time to do so now.

    The Dust Brothers (Michael Simpson and John King) musical score suits the movie well.

    The surround channel usage can only be described in one way - excellent. However, the sound field does collapse into the centre channel on several occasions. I felt that this was either a deliberate choice by the director or the result of some poor sound mixing rather than a transfer problem.

    The subwoofer was well-used and perfectly integrated into the sound stage. Not once did it call attention to itself.

Audio Ratings Summary

Dialogue
Audio Sync
Clicks/Pops/Dropouts
Surround Channel Use
Subwoofer
Overall

Menu

Theatrical Trailer (2:33 minutes)

Disc One

• Commentary by director David Fincher.
• Commentary by David Fincher, Brad Pitt, Ed Norton, and Helena Bonham Carter.
• Commentary by novelist, Chuck Palahniuk and screenwriter, Jim Uhls.
• Commentary by production designer Alex McDowell, cinematographer, Jeff Cronenweth, costume designer, Michael Kaplan, and visual effects supervisor, Kevin Haug.

Disc Two

• Filmographies and Biographies for 18 members of the cast and crew.
• Production Extras: Main title sequence, Airport, Jack's condo, Paper Street house, Projection booth and Corporate office ball.
• Visual Effects Extras: Main title sequence, Furniture catalogue, Ice cave / Power animal photogrammetry, Mid-air collision, Sex sequence, Car crash, Gun shot and High rise collapse.
• On Location Extra: Behind the Scenes, On Location, Stunt, Make-up and Prop footage.
• 7 deleted / alternate scenes.
• Theatrical trailer.
• Teaser.
• 'Eight Rules Of Fight Club' teaser which was never used during the film's advertising campaign.
• 17 TV spots - domestic and international.
• 2 ‘Public Service Announcements’ one by Jack and one by Tyler Durden.
• Music video by the Dust Brothers.
• 5 Internet spots.
• Lobby Cards.
• Press Kit.
• Stills.
• Transcript of an interview given by Edward Norton at his alma mater, Yale University, about the film
• Entire storyboard catalogue used to make the film.
• Visual effects stills.
• Paper Street house stills.
• Costume and make-up sketches.
• Pre-production paintings.
• Sketches and paintings made for the ‘Brain Map’ sequence, which opens the film.

    The quality of the soundtrack is truly excellent, and only just falls short of being reference quality.

    In regards to extras, all we get for now is a poor quality Theatrical Trailer. As this is only the rental version, we will have to wait and see what we get on the retail version. It is worth checking out the R4 vs R1 section just to see the unbelievable amount of extras that come on the R1 version, on two discs, no less!

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall