YMMV / Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me

• Alternative Character Interpretation: The film casts a number on the characters's actions in the series, more often than not it makes them look a lot more sinister.
  • The Man from Another Place can easily be seen as a malevolent figure here. He may just be opposing BOB because BOB is hogging all the Garmonbozia from the other Black Lodge denizens, rather than for any noble reason. Similarly he might be MIKE's evil side judging by his comments that he is The Arm. And even if these interpretations are true he might still just be a case of Blue-and-Orange Morality acting in a way that seems evil but is ultimately alien in his motives.
  • MIKE can be seen as having faked atonement especially with his last scene where he and the Man from Another Place demand their share of the Garmonbozia. Instead of wanting to stop BOB for any good reason, he's simply after the Garmonbozia for himself. Or that was him denouncing BOB as MIKE had foiled his attempt at possessing Laura. Or it could just be a necessity for him to live, Heel–Face Turn or no. Or the presence of a man who may be the Arm he cut off which represented his evil was affecting him negatively. It’s worth noting that, in the scene, The Man From Another Place is pressed up against where MIKE’s arm would have been, and that the two are speaking in a creepy unison that seems oddly forced on MIKE’s part, as if he were a ventriloquist dummy that was being controlled.
  • The film also puts into question Leland Palmer's image as a good father. How much of his behavior is because of BOB's possession? Is BOB really controlling him, or is he just influencing him? Did Leland have a dark side that BOB fed on to make him do bad things or did BOB just create that dark side? We see that he's unable to engage with the sex workers with his daughter involved, but he also only got in that situation from hiring one intentionally to look like his daughter. He also comments that he always thought Laura knew while killing her, whereas BOB says he never knew she was seeing him.
• Awesome Music:
  • The film's theme itself, fittingly enough a twist on "Laura Palmer's Theme" from the series, featuring really melancholic trumpet playing as sort of lead singer.
  • "The Pink Room", a slow rock track just oozing with sleaze.
• Broken Base: Some of the original series' fans think it was pretty much needless, added nothing to the series' charm (even did the opposite) and explained things that didn't need explanations; other fans love it. Reasons given for love are focusing more on Laura and not just treating her like a dead prop, more seriousness (Lynch and Lee got victims of incest thanking them for the movie), and not completely letting Leland off the hook for his abuse.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: While the film was originally met with a lukewarm critical response in the West, and ended up as a Box Office Bomb, it became a smash hit on the Japanese market.
• Heartwarming Moments: In the Missing Pieces, a rare nice moment where Leland teaches Laura and Sarah Norwegian and they all crack up laughing.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: The opening sequence is set in Fargo, North Dakota, somewhere that would also become well known for crimes with their own brand of vaguely supernatural weirdness.
  • The Black Lodge abducts David Bowie with, among other things, tv static over the screen.
• Les Yay: The hints of some sort of romantic attachment between Laura and Donna are more explicit in the movie than the show. The fact that Laura was only seen alive in one shaky home-video-style scene in the show kept things pretty ambiguous, but the film shows a Pseudo-Romantic Friendship that might have gone somewhere else if Laura wasn't so afraid that her sexuality in general would corrupt Donna.
• Narm: Numerous examples, but none more narmy than Laura and James' exchange about being 'gone, long gone, like a turkey in the corn' - not helped by the fact that Laura's 'Gobble, gobble' anticipates another notorious narmfest, Gigli.
  • "No, Donna... you were right! I'M the MUFFIN!" The sulking look afterwards is priceless.
• One-Scene Wonder: Loads of these. David Bowie shows up for all of a minute as Agent Jeffries (whose role in the shooting script was slightly larger), Harry Dean Stanton as a bizarre trailer park landlord, etc.
• Vindicated by History: The premiere of the film at Cannes was greeted by boos and jeers, and most American reviews of the film upon its release were highly unfavourable, accusing the film of betraying fans of the series. Quentin Tarantino personally savaged it. European reviews of the film were more favourable, however, and over time the film has undergone a significant critical reevaluation, to the point that it is considered one of Lynch's better films and an significant step in his evolution as a film maker. The initial negative reaction is nowadays mostly seen as the result of the film being released at a time when most professional critics saw everything Twin Peaks as utterly uncool, and therefore never had any intention of giving the film a fair shake. More recently, it has also come to be seen as a crucial part of the story told in the series revival (which is tonally closer to this movie than the original series), bringing things full circle.
• The Woobie: With all the quirky Twin Peaks antics gone, all you're left with is a young girl's last week of her life, plagued with abuse and self loathing.

---