They Live (1988)

(On DVD, August 2019) It’s a shame that writer-director John Carpenter never got to carry his extraordinary peak of creativity beyond the mid-1990s—At a time when genre cinema became wilder and more prevalent, it seems a waste that he never truly enjoyed the infinite capabilities of digital filmmaking or the far more genre-literate audience. Still, he can be proud of having produced something like eight genre masterpieces in the twenty-year period between 1975 and 1995, and They Live is clearly one of his best. Even today, there’s a biting ferociousness to the film’s social criticism, recasting a rigged economic system in a metaphor of alien invasion and exploitation. The metaphor of reading secret alien messages (“Consume!”) with the right viewing equipment is so simple and yet still incredibly effective. Of course, there’s more than just a consumerism critique here: the film works because it features an everyday man (a great casting choice in ex-wrestler Roddy Piper) fighting back against the oppressors. The film probably peaks during the lengthy fight between Piper and Keith David—the third act seems overly familiar, and actually quite conventional when compared to some of the incendiary material that preceded it—I mean, the bank shootout sequence can be incredibly disturbing if it wasn’t for greedy aliens being involved. Great one-liners and a straightforward delivery of satirical material still work well today. They Live is still a classic, and its critique of neoliberal Reaganomics hasn’t been invalidated in the slightest by thirty plus years of perspective. Carpenter could retire on a mere handful of his movies, and They Live makes quite a claim at being among his essentials.