The Breakfast Club and its theme are universal

Rating: 10/10 (5 March 2006)

As an exchange student from Holland I walked in blindly when I went to an American high school. I was only 18, my English was not too good, but it was such an big adventure that all the difficulties didn't matter. It opened my eyes on America from the inside, and, especially, how people deal with each other in that country.
The way the teenagers in The Breakfast Club could be described as purely American by (mostly) Europeans who have never been to the United States. These people tend to think that, when they see a movie like this, the American way of interaction is (over)dramatized and that they would never talk the way the teenagers do in TBC.
Wrong. I have traveled quite a bit in both North-America and Europe and I have met people from all over the world. These kind of conversations, the entire process of opening up to each other, are universal. Whenever people end up together in a situation similar to the one in TBC, they start doing the same thing. And that's exactly what makes the movie and its theme so recognizable for people all around the world. The American setting doesn't matter. It could have been filmed in a Dutch windmill and still have the same effect on Americans and other nationalities.
And so even skeptic Europeans have to admit that this movie is a classic. And trust me, all the people around me who have seen it do. They think that The Breakfast Club is simply brilliant. And right they are! The dialogs, the scenario, the directing, the music and the acting all come together as one big thing. As a whole. It's so touching. Viewers feel what the characters feel and wonder what they would do and say in a situation similar to the one in TBC. I think we should thank John Hughes for leaving generations to come with such a state of the art motion picture!