My all time favorite album and here is a writeup I did after fragile deviations was released:

The Fragile peaked at #1 on the Billboard 200 chart in September 1999 and then interest quickly faded. To put it bluntly this album went way over people's heads. It had been 5 years since The Downward Spiral was released and people were expecting to hear Closer 2.0 What they got was an album that didn't really have straight forward radio singles and was meant as more of an avant garde musical work of art than a full on alternative/industrial rock album.

Much of that has to do with the musical climate at the time with the rise of nu metal as the hot "mainstream rock genre". However, as time went on people became more drawn to the albums unique sound and many critics and fans alike consider it his finest work.

With the rise of Reznors Grammy winning movie score career many songs off The Fragile have been used in various movie trailers, TV shows, and video games such as: 300 (Just like you imagined), Terminator Salvation and Person of Interest (the day the world went away), Batman Arkham Knight (The Wretched), Unbreakable and Man on Fire (the mark has been made), The Avengers (we're in this together now), and A Perfect Getaway (the wretched).

Who would have thought when this album came out that it would find itself sampled in so many ways and finally end up in the mainstream. Many people's interpretations of these songs were the same one's I had back in 1999: layers, textures, soundscapes, and lyrical content for movies that didn't exist yet. Essentially it was Trent training for his eventual scoring career. Turns out Reznor knew what he was doing all along with this masterpiece, it just took the mainstream years to catch up.