(Los Angeles) The End of American Film fight club as recently modified for release in China is actually closer to the original novel, the author said.
Posted yesterday at 3:42 p.m.
The communist regime only allows a few foreign films to be shown in China each year, and censors do not hesitate to remove scenes considered disturbing.
For fight clubmore than two decades after the release of David Fincher’s film in 1999, moviegoers noticed that the version broadcast by the platform Tencent Video had changed the anarchist and anti-capitalist message of the work.
In the original version, the narrator played by Edward Norton kills his imaginary alter ego played by Brad Pitt and then witnesses the explosion of buildings symbolizing the destruction of the modern world dreamed of by the hero.
The version broadcast in China ends with a kind of ” happy ending “. Doomsday images are replaced with a black screen and text that reads, “Police have foiled the plan and arrested all criminals, preventing the bombs from exploding.” »
This truncated end scandalized some fans of the film, but Chuck Palahniuk, whose novel published in 1996 inspired the film, was not moved more than that.
“It’s ironic, but the way the Chinese edited it, the ending is almost exactly the same as the book,” the author told entertainment and celebrity site TMZ.
The ending chosen by David Fincher “was much more spectacular visually […] so in a way, the Chinese brought the film a bit closer to the book,” he says.
The writer points out that his work has frequently been altered in its various foreign language editions to more closely follow the plot of the cult film.
“Many of my editors internationally changed the novel so that it ended like the movie,” he says.
“So I’ve been dealing with this kind of revision for about 25 years,” concludes the writer.