Fight Club
The first half of Edward Norton's journey takes place in the first 15 minutes of the movie. He can't sleep. He starts going to the 12-step survivor classes. He pretends to be a loser like all of the other survivors and cries with them. He sleeps better than a baby. Every night he dies and is reborn.Reluctantly he is thrust back into the real world. Helena B. Carter shows up, and by getting in on Norton's action, someone else now knows what a faker he is. The experience is ruined for him. He can't sleep.
The cycle or death and rebirth is interrupted. When the other characters are confronted with their own mortality, with gun or with car, they know then what they want to do. Everyone knows except Edward Norton. This is the vacuum in Norton from which Brad Pitt emerges.
So, the next 2¼ hours of the movie is Norton's complex machinations to save the World as he himself was saved in his nightly resurrection. Brad Pitt is Destruction. Killing Brad Pitt is Resurrection.
The Fight Club itself is Brad Pitt replicating the Cult Consumerism, which becomes his means for saving the world.
The Game
At first I didn't like this movie. It appeared as if Michael Douglas was grateful that he had been driven to commit suicide.Michael Douglas's wealthy father commits suicide by jumping off of the roof of his house. So living in the same house, Michael Douglas spends his life insulating himself from his father's final act by sterilizing his life with wealth and power.
Participating in the Game, his insulation disintegrates and he is forced to suffer, and into the guilty shame of accidentally killing his brother. He then jumps off the roof and is able to die of himself, allowed to be reborn.
Alien³
I need to go out of order, because much of my understanding of Fincher's movies comes from this one. (This is the only one I've seen more than once.)Ripley is the last survivor of the escape pod from the second movie. Newt and the marine are dead, and the android couldn't handle existing in pieces. At the funeral, Charles Dutton asks, rhetorically, why innocents must be sacrificed. Newt will never know the agony of those who survive her. If you like, only the good die young.
The criminals who tended the refinery were men who gave into murderous temptation, and transformed their lives with puritanical religion into day to day suffering. When the monster arrives, after briefly considering allowing the company to capture and exploit the creature, they adopt the laborious task of killing the alien themselves.
Seven
The deadly sins are insulators to life, like the wealth and power Michael Douglas had surrounded himself with in "The Game." People give into the temptation of sin and vice, as they give into the consumerism Brad Pitt fights in "Fight Game." Why? To numb the suffering of everyday life.Morgan Freeman is a seasoned homicide detective. Brad Pitt, like his wife Gwenyth Paltrow, is innocent. Gwenyth Paltrow is sacrificed and Brad Pitt is confronted with the guilt and suffering of surviving her. And, when given the choice of living day to day in suffering and giving into the sin that robs us of our complete lives, he gives in to sin.
At the end, Morgan Freeman, the only survivor in the movie who lives whole, half-dismisses a quote by Hemingway (who killed himself), about the World being such a wonderful place worth fighting for.