YMMV / St. Elmo's Fire

• Awesome Music: Take a guess.
• Critical Dissonance: It did well at the box office and a few fondly think of it as one of the 80s classics, despite not exactly winning over the critics (Siskel & Ebert named it as one of the worst movies of 1985).
• Designated Hero: With the exception of Wendy and possibly Leslie, none of the main characters are particularly likeable.
  • According to Joel Schumacher, "a lot of people turned down the script . . . the head of [a] major studio called its seven-member cast 'the most loathsome humans he had ever read on the page'."
  • Kirby is one of the main characters and is written as sympathetic, and yet exhibits some seriously alarming stalker red flags, such as: claiming to be in love and obsessed with a girl he only went on one date with years ago and who hardly recognizes him, watching her from a distance in a party and meeting her there despite not being invited, being unreasonably angry at the fact that she didn't go to a party he threw for her, threatening her roommate in order to find out where she is and finally giving her The Big Damn Kiss that is quite dubiously consensual.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Rob Lowe's character is sometimes referred to as "Billy the Kid." Three years later, Emilio Estevez would play said famous outlaw.
  • During the Halloween party scene, Billy wears a shirt with bats on it. Ten years later, Joel Schumacher would direct a movie about bats.
• Jerkass Woobie: Jules. She may be vain and materialistic, but one cannot help but feel sorry for her when she goes broke- to the point where she attempts suicide. Anyone going through financial struggles can emphasize with how stressed she must feel in that moment.
• Unintentional Period Piece: Jules is almost constantly doing cocaine, Alec and Leslie argue over who gets to keep the Bruce Springsteen, The Police, and The Pretenders albums when they break up, and there's a passing reference to the Cold War as an unbridgeable stalemate. Oddly, the portrayal of gay people is fairly '70s, with Jules believing that Kevin is gay because he was never interested in her (he is actually interested in her friend Leslie), and trying to set him up with her decorator next door neighbor. Despite coming out in 1985, there are no references to the AIDS crisis — possibly because AIDS was widely considered a "gay disease" at the time, not something mainstream America had to worry about.
• Values Dissonance: With changing attitudes toward many of the tropes in play, modern audiences would consider this film Fair for Its Day at best.
  • Kirby's entire Stalker with a Crush behavior towards a woman who seems barely if at all interested to him and particularly his dip kiss were probably seen as Refuge in Audacity or outright romantic persistence in The '80s, and the movie plays the latter as a Moment of Awesome. Even the woman in question wonders if she's not missing out on him, for some reason. Nowadays he could only be written as an outright stalker.
  • Although the way Jules tries to self-harm is rather nonsensical and unlikely to work, the behavior and reasoning would probably not be just waved off as "self-created drama" nowadays, especially with how they were using cocaine and sex to cope with their issues throughout the movie.
• The Woobie: Leslie. On the same night that she finds out that the man she loves has been cheating on her every which way to Sunday, he then kicks her out for discovering this (and in front of all their friends no less). When it's discovered that she then spent the night with Kevin, Alec lashes out at her, finds every opportunity he can to antagonize and blames her for ruining their relationship even though technically she didn't cheat on him as he had already broken up with her!

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