YMMV / Spring Breakers

• Awesome Music:
  • "Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites" by Skrillex, used in the opening scene.
  • Also "Lights" by Ellie Goulding, which plays over the credits and matches the film's simultaneously colorful and cold atmosphere.
• Best Known for the Fanservice: For some, the movie made the rounds solely for featuring hot young ladies in revealing clothing, even going naked in some cases.
• Broken Base: The movie as a whole is massively polarizing, with the main focus concerning the rampant hedonism and Fanservice. Some critics and viewers see the movie as a Deconstruction of the hedonistic lifestyle by showing how empty, selfish, and self-destructive it is, especially considering the moral characters leave safely while the bad ones either die or get in too deep to quit. Others believe it glamorizes that kind of lifestyle and is borderline exploitive in its fanservice.
• Critical Dissonance: It seems most people don't like to share the critics' views, whose 65% on Rotten Tomatoes is contrasted with that community's 38% and IMDB's 5.3/10.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Even people who don't particularly care for the movie very much enjoyed Selena Gomez's performance as Faith, mainly for her Nice Girl status and surprisingly strong performance (for those who prejudged her due to her Disney roles, anyways)
• Harsher in Hindsight: Alien's anxious participation for a threesome with the young girls Candy and Brit and his caressing Faith's face and making her uncomfortable becomes this following actor James Franco's leaked online chats with a 17-year-old girl in 2014 as well as his sexual misconduct allegations in 2018.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: This film has been compared by many, many people to Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, albeit with a present-day setting and its Villain Protagonists being women. Come 2022, a massive Content Leak revealed that the work-in-progress next Grand Theft Auto game will indeed be set in a modern-day take on Vice City, and moreover, one of its two confirmed playable characters will be a woman named Lucia, the first canonical female protagonist in the series' history.
• Just Here for Godzilla: Considering most of the internet's reaction to this movie, many people went to this movie to see Selena Gomez and Vanessa Hudgens (and to a slightly lesser extent, Ashley Benson) break out of their teen idol shells, which can mean either genuinely observing their onscreen talents in a serious film or just coming for the bikinis and provocative camera angles.
• Narm: Alien and the girls terrorizing other spring breakers while Britney Spears plays in the background is supposed to be a disturbing juxtaposition. What makes the scene narmy are the weird things they do, such as shoving a person's face in a cake, and the facial expressions they give just makes it too funny. Could also count as Narm Charm.
• Nausea Fuel: Some of the shots can have this effect on people.
• Spiritual Adaptation: It's either the best adaptation of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City ever made, or a deconstruction of such. It's got the Florida setting, the neon-drenched style that heavily evokes The '80s (despite being set in the present day), the sociopathic Villain Protagonists running headfirst across the Moral Event Horizon because "spring break, bitches!", and the winking self-awareness of its own "gangsta" attitude.
• Tearjerker:
  • Faith's breakdown about halfway through the movie is pretty sad, as she keeps weeping about how she wants to go home and begs her friends to come with her. They don't.
  • Cotty's Shower of Angst after getting shot in the arm, followed up by her going back home.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: The conflict and past between Alien and Archie would have made for some good Character Development for the former, but the movie doesn't do much with that in favor of the girls' exploits.
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: It's already introduced in the beginning that there are no genuinely nice people in this film with the exception of Faith, but by the time she and Cotty are Put on a Bus, there seems to be no more redeemable people left. And with bridges dropped everywhere in the climax, the only people left are a pair of Manipulative Karma Houdinis.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Cotty. While her Shower of Angst is meant to be a Tearjerker as mentioned above, a lot of fans felt indifferent at best considering she happily went along with every thing the group was doing up until it had some negative ramifications on her.

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