In a match-up of films adapted from novels, we have Fight Club taking on A Clockwork Orange in this round one battle. Unlike some books which are poorly adapted into film (think The Da Vinci Code), both Fight Club and A Clockwork Orange are adequate representations of the novels by Palahniuk and Burgess, respectively.
Fight Club (1999)
- Directed by: David Fincher
- Written by: Chuck Palahniuk (novel “Fight Club”), Jim Uhls (screenplay)
- Starring: Brad Pitt, Edward Norton, Helena Bonham Carter, Meat Loaf
- Rotten Tomatoes
- Critics: 81%
- Audience: 95%
David Fincher (director of Se7en, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, The Social Network) teamed up with Jim Uhls in this adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk’s novel, Fight Club. Our Narrator (Edward Norton) is an employee at a major car manufacturer who suffers from insomnia. Traveling from state to state, day after day, living a single-serving life (featuring single-serving friends), he finds himself lost in reality. “If you wake up at a different time, in a different place, could you wake up as a different person?” He soon finds himself attending support groups for the terminally ill (testicular cancer, lymphoma, tuberculosis, brain parasites, and organic brain dementia, to name a few), using them as a therapy so that he can release his emotions and, consequently, sleep for once. He comes home (home “...was a condo on the fifteenth floor of a filing cabinet for widows and young professionals. The walls were solid concrete. A foot of concrete is important when your next-door neighbor lets their hearing aid go and have to watch game-shows at full volume. Or when a volcanic blast of debris that used to be your furniture and personal effects blows out of your floor-to-ceiling windows and sails flaming into the night.”) after a business trip to find his belonging smoldering on the sidewalk below; his apartment is now a crime scene. He then meets up with Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), one of his recently-acquired single-serving friends, for a night of drinking and fighting. From there, our Narrator goes on an enlightening journey featuring chaos, blood, nitro glycerin, terrorism, Project Mayhem, and soap.
A Clockwork Orange (1971)
- Directed by: Stanley Kubrick
- Written by: Stanley Kubrick (screenplay), Anthony Burgess (novel “A Clockwork Orange”)
- Starring: Malcolm McDowell, Warren Clarke, Michael Bates
- Rotten Tomatoes
- Critics: 91%
- Audience: 92%
Stanley Kubrick (director of Full Metal Jacket, 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Shining) directed this film adaptation of the American version of Anthony Burgess’ 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange. The original version of the novel, published in the United Kingdom, featured 21 chapters, while the American version (and film) featured only 20 chapters. Many, including Burgess’ publishers, felt that the final chapter was so inconsistent with the rest of the story that it would somehow taint the overall style and intent of the novel. IMDB sums up the plot quite nicely in a post by Nikky Carlyle:
Protagonist Alex (Malcolm McDowell) is an "ultraviolent" youth in futuristic Britain. As with all luck, his eventually runs out and he's arrested and convicted of murder and rape. While in prison, Alex learns of an experimental program in which convicts are programed to detest violence. If he goes through the program his sentence will be reduced and he will be back on the streets sooner than expected. But Alex's ordeals are far from over once he hits the mean streets of Britain that he had a hand in creating.
Vote now for your favorite movie: Fight Club or A Clockwork Orange
