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They Live Movie Review

They Live is a 1988 science fiction action horror film directed by John Carpenter and starring Roddy Piper. It’s a deeply flawed, but highly entertaining genre flick.

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“I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass…

and I’m all out of bubblegum“

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It follows a drifter who discovers through special sunglasses that the ruling class are aliens concealing their appearance and manipulating people to spend money, breed and accept the status quo with subliminal messages in mass media. First of all, that premise is awesome. The best scenes here are those where sunglasses are being utilized. The aliens in my opinion looked very spooky and striking, such scenes were very creepy and the suspense was palpable.

It’s a shame, then, that the second half quickly resorted to populist genre fare, which is typical for the eighties, but still I hoped for the opposite. Whereas the movie was quite serious at first, it then became very cheesy, campy and silly. Still, undoubtedly those scenes are mostly fun, but again overly dated in their 80s blockbuster approach.

Case in point – the fight scene between Nada and Frank. Overall, the scene is entertaining in its ridiculousness and quite amusing to watch, but it overstays its welcome and it was simply too silly to begin with, though I liked it as a plot point and their friendship I personally dug. The ending, though, is the best representative of that silly, comedic style as it was very memorable and quite funny to be honest.

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My main gripe with They Live has to be the acting. Meg Foster and Keith David are reasonably okay in their pretty good roles. Again, they’re far from great, but at least they are serviceable. However, that cannot be said for our main guy.

Yes, Roddy Piper was simply horrendous as Nada. He’s so bad, in fact, that he made his very campy character in the first place even more insufferably campy. Some of his lines of dialogue are cult favorites for sure, but his delivery of those lines is atrocious. Wrestlers shouldn’t be actors is the one message you can take from this movie.

They Live is mostly respected these days for its thematic resonance. It was a box office bomb and a critical failure at first, but it’s now quite admired for its themes with which I have to agree myself. The exhaustion of resources, consumerism and advertising using subliminal messages are so well explored with the aliens being a great allegory standing for any corporation or government. That level of applicability made the movie rather timeless despite its obvious timely elements that may seem silly to today’s audiences. But its core remains valuable and sadly relevant even today.

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They Live to me has solid effects. I do not get the hate that it got for its visuals when the extraterrestrials to me looked quite creepy and visually intriguing. I also liked the sets and the action scenes, though silly, are well executed and fun. The score is repetitive for sure. However, it’s still very memorable and accompanying its darker, spooky atmosphere very well. The darker elements all worked for me, but the silly ones made the film’s tone jumbled.

Despite its numerous flaws, John Carpenter’s They Live succeeds as a strong SF parable on consumerism and subliminal messages in mass media. The typically campy 80s elements are certainly present here – the action is fun, but silly, and the less said about Roddy Piper’s horrendous performance, the better – but the aliens themselves are spooky, the score is creepy and the sunglasses scenes are very effective in their suspense.

My Rating – 4

You can get They Live on Amazon.