YMMV / The Purge Universe

• Fanfic Fuel: The entire film franchise as of now is a huge wasted potential. The idea of a lawless society for one night, as absurd as it sounds, offers a huge area for further exploration other than the action-horror-political genre we see repeatedly playing in 5 movies. We could have, just for instance:
  • A Black Comedy featuring hedonists
  • A thriller featuring during/before/after Purge Day
  • A Heist Episode that was planned on Purge Day
  • A Courtroom Episode about the mechanics of Purge Day
  • A romantic/comedy/drama focusing on a few people in a neighborhood during/before/after Purge Day
  • ... And more.
• Heartwarming Moments: The fact that the government had to practically force people to use the Purge for murder because everyone was just having ridiculous parties and engaging in trickster style fun. After how horrible the initial movies and series painted people, Humans Are Bastards was proven wrong here.
• Magnificent Bastard: Sgt. Leo Barnes and Dmitri Cimber. See their pages for details.
• Salvaged Story:
  • The first movie is a horror/thriller which details a suburban American family's struggle to survive the titular event, which is basically an annual government-sanctioned crime spree, purportedly to give the people a chance to act out their violent urges and keep crime down. The result is a home invasion flick with a flimsy Hand Wave explaining away why the family can't just call the cops. After a year of various people snarking at the idea, the sequel, The Purge: Anarchy, attempts to remedy things by revealing that the Purge is simply a scheme by the corrupt ruling oligarchy to terrorise and murder working-class people for fun and profit. The vast majority of citizens hide from the Purge rather than participate in it, so state-sanctioned death squads roam around massacring people to keep up the statistics, and of course, the rich and powerful are completely safe from the Purge and its consequences. The sequel follows a Working Class Anti-Hero protagonist protecting a bunch of people caught up in the Purge and way in over their heads from government death squads. This simultaneously addresses the first film's copious Fridge Logic while tying it all up with a nice political satire and anti-establishment message.
  • A common criticism of the premise was that most people, when given the chance to do anything normally illegal, would probably commit petty crimes like looting or using illegal drugs over the violence and murder shown. The sequels helped rectify this complaint by showing that a lot of the killing was being done by the aforementioned government-sanctioned death squads to make it look this way, with most ordinary citizens either hiding away or sticking to petty crimes.
• Sliding Scale of Social Satisfaction: Categorized as "Peak of Crime". The US government enacts a period of 12 hours where nothing is illegal in order to satisfy people's violent impulses. Mayhem ensues and only the rich can truly protect themselves.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Perhaps the single most common criticism of the original film is that it largely ignores the most interesting and unsettling thing about its premise—namely, the apparent implication that the United States is now ruled by a fascist regime. Instead of fully exploring the implied dystopian themes of the story, the filmmakers largely treated the premise as an Excuse Plot to facilitate a fairly generic suspense story about an affluent family being menaced by a gang of home invaders. Thankfully, the sequels were quick to address this criticism.