The Breakfast Club does a good and realistic job of capturing what it was like in high school

Rating: 8/10 (29 October 2011)

The Breakfast Club does a good and realistic job of capturing what it was like in high school for the average American teenager. The movie revolves around the theme that teenagers often succumb to the pressures of society to group off into their own social classes with no tolerance for those who are different, whether that is from peer pressure or family values, but if we look past those social boundaries, we may find that we like what's on the outside.
The movie starts off showing all the parents dropping off the teens at their high school for Saturday detention. The main characters and stars are: the jock, Andrew, played by Emilio Estevez; the geek, Brian, played by Anthony Michael Hall; the trouble maker, John, played by Judd Nelson; the preppy girl, Claire, played by Molly Ringwald; the freak, Allison, played by Ally Sheedy; and the principle, Richard, played by Paul Gleason.
The movie really is a movie of clichés, as the plot revolves around the central theme that the geeks, preps, trouble makers, and weirdo's all tend to stick to their own groups and really don't fully understand the other groups, but if they took the time to understand each other, they would realize that most of them are alike in a lot of ways. Motif is continuously used to drive home the theme of the movie, because we are constantly reminded through the dialog between characters, that they are all from different social groups and they don't understand each other.
Throughout the movie we continuously learn of each characters life story and what makes them who they are and we quickly find out the common theme is that they all think there home life is a drag so to speak. Andrew is constantly pressured by his father to be a winner and to win at all costs, Brian is pressured by his parent to make sure he always does perfect academically, John isn't pressured at all by his parents, he just has a bad home life where he is mentally and physically abused, Claire feels that her parents don't care about her, they just use her to get back at one-another, and Allison is just completely ignored by her parents.
The home troubles are really what brought the kids together throughout the course of the film. In the beginning there were often clashes between John and Andrew because of the way he talked to the other kids in detention. John spends most of the movie making fun of the others and causing trouble with the principle Richard, which eventually leads to John being banished to a closet. But as is predictable from the very beginning, the more the kids talk to each other the more they begin to get along, and like typical teenagers, what really brings them together is there dislike of their parents, and overall home life. Dialogue is the main way the director gets across the theme, by continuously showing scenes where the kids are interacting socially with each other and getting to know each other's stories.
The ending of the movie is ridiculous, but doesn't detract from the movie overall, as we observe John and Claire hooking up and Andrew and Allison pairing up. Those scenarios are highly unlikely in the real world over the course of one Saturday morning, but I think the purpose of the ending was to drive home the theme, that if we take the time to understand one another, that we might find out we like someone who we perceive as different.