MovieChat Forums > St. Elmo's Fire (1985) Discussion > What is this movie about?

What is this movie about?


I've watched it for the third time in about 20 years, and I still can't figure out any point or purpose to it. While the characters are ridiculous enough to make it watchable, what is the theme? What's the point? How can you have a movie about nothing? A movie doesn't have to have a grand good-vs-evil theme, but a theme nonetheless is necessary! I suspect this movie uses a lot of cunning and highly skilful tricks to make you keep watching and forget that it's really just super-mundane tosh.

One idea I had, was that the movie falls because the plot centers around some very ordinary and average people flaunting their rather pedestrian 'great expectations', living by the old 'fake it till you make it' adage, but failing to exhibit any extraordinary qualities that raise them above the lowest common denominator average man or woman.

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I'd say pretty much 'life is hard' after college would be the central theme with a cast of characters that look nothing like ordinary people. This is one of my favorite "bad" movies of all time, but they painted the cast in such broad strokes (yuppie, frat boy, nice girl, tortured writer) that it may as been a Friday the 13th sequel. To me, it wasn't the soundtrack, atmosphere or cast that caused the critical failure, rather it that there really wasn't anyone to really rally behind.

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Growing up

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Just the struggles of a gang of tight friends as they grow up and start to prepare to separate really. What's wrong with that?

Seinfeld was a true show about nothing and it's maybe the greatest show ever made.

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They were trying to do another Breakfast Club but with older characters. The problem is most of us grow out of being so 'emotionally tortured' and pigeon holed by the age of these characters.

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Trials and tribulations of being an upwardly mobile upper middle-class caucasian college graduate of the mid-1980s.

When there's no more room in Hollywood, remakes shall walk the Earth.

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It's kind of a reportorial story showing what life was like for people of that age and status at that time. To watch it today holds up a mirror to the "Greed is good" culture of the 80s.

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About an hour and 50 minutes.

Seriously though, I watched it and I can't for the life of me even recall a single scene.



😎

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