Yar, you be here: They Live > Customer Reviews

They Live Customer Reviews (22 - 24 of 46 Reviews)

The paranoid are always right!
Carpenter's classic 1988 film, THEY LIVE, can be seen as an(other) inspiration to Chris Carter's "The X Files" with its conspiracy of like-minded aliens and humans manipulating the masses of Earthlings. Roddy Piper, as an out-of-work working class hero, stumbles upon sunglasses which allow him to see the reality behind the facades, the messages beneath the billboards, the subliminal under the overt, and, more eerily, the strangely Dan Quayle looking creatures under the human masks. (Appropriate for 1988--after all, Quayle was vice president at the time.) Piper's efforts to alarm the general public and infiltrate this conspiracy make up most of the middle third of the film, and it ends, appropriately, with guns ablazing and things exploding.

Fortunately, this movie doesn't take itself too seriously, otherwise it might have been disastrous. (In mood and tone, THEY LIVE is first cousin to 1989's TREMORS.) A good dose of campy humor keeps THEY LIVE from becoming a diatribe on capital versus labor, rich versus poor, etc. Instead, THEY LIVE is a classic, sci-fi B movie whose heart is in the right place.

"I'm all out of bubblegum..."
Another forgotten gem from horror master John Carpenter (The Thing, Halloween, Vampires), They Live is a fantastic sci-fi/horror B-movie that is still enjoyable today, albeit a bit dated. "Rowdy" Roddy Piper stars as Nada; a drifter who finds a pair of sunglasses that allow him to see the truth. When he looks at magazines, billboards, or advertisements, he sees hidden messages that say OBEY, MARRY & REPRODUCE, STAY ASLEEP, and so on, but when he looks at a few people, he sees behind their disguises and sees them as the grotesque bug eyed alien invaders that they truly are. More or less a satire of consumerism and commercialism, Carpenter manages to pull out plenty of his tricks to make They Live an unrelenting, and always entertaining, ride that sci-fi fans, and Carpenter fans who may have missed out on this, will no doubt enjoy. The never ending fight scene between Piper and Keith David is reason enough to see this film. The DVD however, has no extras at all. Universal could have at least put something on here, trailers or a commentary or something, but alas, this is another bare bones DVD.

elite, parasitic sub-society exploits American workers
Elite, parasitic subsociety exploits American working class--reflects real American society?

This movie is not so much about aliens who are hiding among us, but instead it taps into the deeply submerged suspicions of most of us that we are being manipulated and taken advantage of by the elite of American society, by our leaders, by the rich, etc. Also, we sometimes feel that we are manipulated and programmed (in a subtle way) to respect hierarchical authority ( e.g., the "OBEY" subliminal command from the movie).

Some leftist thinkers might say that human societies are in a way being parasitized by the elite of their societies, and that the elite operate as a parasitic sub-society, living off of the lower classes. America might be said to be operated more in such a fashion (i.e., parasitized by the elite) than are the countries of western Europe. Obvious examples of this parasitic behavior are the "golden handshakes" and backscratching exchanged between corporate CEO's and the Boards of Directors of their companies. But it is far more pervasive than just that.

_They_Live_ uses the invisible alien elite as a proxy for our suspicions about how we are all being exploited by the elite of our real-life society, and how these elite are subtly programming us to accept this exploitation.

So, the major theme of the movie is not, as another poster correctly pointed out, about being manipulated to be good little consumers in a crassly commercial world. No, it is far more profound than that. Instead, it is more about how the working class Americans in _They Live_ are being exploited by the elite upper crust, who, in the movie, happen to be aliens. Also, this movie is not relevant ONLY to Reagan's time, or to Reaganomics, but it is more relavant today than it was when it was released.

Unfortunately, this movie only explores this exploitation theme in a somewhat superficial way, and the movie itself has an unintentionally comic air to it sometimes. Still, the exploration of that theme is so rare in pop culture, and that theme is so profound, and reaches so far into what American society is, was, and is becoming, that this movie is a Must-See for anyone with an interest in politics and sociology.

Previous Page

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

Next Page