AndrewBloom
CONTAINS SPOILERS7/10 7 months ago
[7.4/10] About a third of the way through *They Live*, Roddy Piper puts on a pair of sunglasses that allow him to see through the deceiving “signal” a pack of alien invaders has bathed the populace in. Suddenly, everything is different. The truth spills out. The world as he knows it is gone. Everything has changed.
It feels like legendary director John Carpenter pulls the same trick on the audience watching his movie. For its first half hour, *They Live* is a gritty, grounded meditation on the struggles of the working man in a system built to hold him down, whose message is felt in the challenges faced by people just trying to get by when the deck is stacked against them.
For the hour that follows, after Piper puts on the shades, *They Live* is a bombastic action film full of firefights and explosions, whose message is felt because the movie practically announces it at every turn, in its dialogue and its iconography.
It’s a compelling message! As with spiritual precursors like Fritz Lang’s *Metropolis* and spiritual successors like Jordan Peele’s *Us*, there’s something undeniably captivating about using the phantasmagoria of horror to examine how our society treats those it’s left behind. For a film released in 1988, laments about failed banks and lost jobs, hard times for factory workers, and a community where it feels like those on top play by different rules still resonate in a post-Great Recession world.
In the film’s opening act, there's the palpable sense of the people stuck on the bootheel of America just trying to survive and barely being able to make a go of it. You see Piper earnestly trying to make a living and being treated like trash for it. You see the contrast of towering skyscrapers in the city skyline juxtaposed with makeshift hovels for the unhoused. You see the only mutual support and shared humanity coming through in that low-to-the-ground space, with zero help from above. These scenes alone are a stark and searing indictment of Reagan’s America that Carpenter intended to take aim at.
To the point, in a movie about malevolent extraterrestrials with unstoppable technology, the scariest set piece in the film isn’t the least bit supernatural. It’s the local authorities bulldozing a homeless encampment in the dead of night, sending terrified residents fleeing for shelter and safety, while the police beat the targets of their ire.
The stylized presentation that Carpenter and his team showed off so well in *Halloween* makes these moments visually striking, with red lights, smoky alleyways, and a sense of constant motion and panic. But they also feel frighteningly real, with an atmosphere that captures the chilling sensations of being immersed in this domination and chaos. The grit and grimness of life on the city streets is brought to life with vivid emotion and gripping truth.
And then, Piper puts on the glasses, and suddenly *They Live* is any other 1980s action film.
That’s not to say it doesn’t have its high points from there. The fight between Piper’s character and his buddy, Frank (played to perfection, as usual, by Keith David) is painful and unglamorous in a way few 1980s dust-ups are, which makes it memorable. And the turn from when Piper’s kidnapping victim, Holly, goes from compliant pawn to bottle-smashing, window-pushing defender is a hell of a “good for her” moment, even when you know the twist.
But the minute piper dons the shades, everything gets louder and blunter. Again, I’m sympathetic to the film’s message, about how 1980s culture and society was organized to maintain the status quo. My god, though, revealing that the messages on advertisements, magazines, and media of all stripes *actually* says, varieties of “obey”, “consume”, “marry and reproduce” etc. is peak “I’m 14 and this is deep.” Suddenly the film goes from a visceral showing of how systems reinforce one another to maintain a certain state of affairs in ways that hurt those on the lowest rungs, to constantly telling the audience what the point is, while practically elbowing us in the ribs the entire way.
It doesn’t help that the hidden aliens Piper’s character is able to see are at least as comical as they are creepy. The special effects work isn’t bad by any stretch, and the concept does a lot of the heavy lifting as to why worrying that friends and neighbors are secretly ghouls would be unnerving. But it’s hard to see folks in halloween masks in 1980s business garb with dolly wigs and pompadours over them without it seeming as silly as it is scary.
More seriously, the concept of the lone gun-toting vigilante has taken on quite a bit of water since 1988. The likes of Rambo, Dirty Harry, and various Charles Bronson characters sit more uneasily in an era where well-armed nuts concocting conspiracy theories and mass shootings are a recurring pathology rather than a cinematic fantasy.
Which is all to say that, even though we know Piper’s character is only going after the bad guys, and that the bad guys are going after him, seeing someone whose trademark is his unhinged persona running around unloading buckets of bullets on randos at various public locales is more disquieting than glorious to the modern eye. That’s not Carpenter’s fault, but it’s a hurdle nonetheless.
All of that said, the overall concept of the film carries a lot of the weight here. The basic reveal of secret power players, corrupted to the gills, reveling in their oppression, is simplistic but powerful. The simple idea of aliens using Earth the way the first world uses the third world is a humbling and demoralizing notion. And most damning are the quisling humans, the ones who can be willingly bought off and subjugated with an expense account and the chance to reign in hell, guiding their fellow men and women into the maw of this corrupt system so long as they can keep benefitting from it.
The sense of capitulation to this evil, of working to preserve a system that hurts everything and everyone so long as it benefits you, is more chilling than any ghouls in rubber masks the film can offer. High-handed or no, the points *They Live* aims to make still land with devastating force.
But even as the film heavily broadcasts those points, it’s more subtle about the details of its world. Beyond a few cryptic comments from the underground leaders, and a loose-lipped schmoozer who spills the beans to our heroes, *They Live* is admirably light on exposition. Piper and David’s characters simply stumble their way into these events, and the audience is left to connect the dots. The result is a world that seems that much more sinister from us witnessing the repression and manipulation rather than it explained to us, and the thrill that comes from unraveling a mystery that comes with more mysteries beyond.
Despite the movies over-the-top action bona fides (which get a boost from cinematographer Gary B. Kibbe’s outstanding framing and composition), there is still terror and triumph in the workaday good guys storming the well-heeled villains’ lair, being betrayed by a supposed friend, and giving their lives to stop the madness. The bombasticness of it drags the proceedings down a bit, but the film maintains that paranoid atmosphere throughout, which makes each twist and turn land with greater impact.
The only thing that holds *They Live* back in its final act otherwise is the naivete in the ending of an otherwise deeply cynical movie. Carpenter and company were and are not alone in the idea that if only the public could see things as they truly are, the efforts to cow and corral them, they’d be horrified and wouldn’t stand for it. Suffice it to say, decades later, we’ve been glasses on/mask off for a while, and a good chunk of the population revels in the ghoulishness rather than recoils from it.
But maybe that’s a sign that, for all of my gripes about the over-the-top and overly didactic nature of the movie once the secret is revealed, *They Live* should have been louder and blunter. While I prefer the quieter, subtler first act of the film to its bigger and more bombastic later movements, the whole picture comes with a message that, for better or worse, still resonates today, and still deserves to be heard. You can’t blame Carpenter for trying to boost that signal, even as he strove to destroy another.
