They Live

Did You Know?

• Carpenter thought of sunglasses as the tool to seeing the truth, which is seen in black and white, and commented that Ted Turner is really a monster from outer space.
• The film's original release date of October 21, 1988 was pushed back two weeks to avoid direct competition with Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers.
• They Live was released on 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray by Shout! Factory on January 19, 2021.

Plot

A homeless drifter named Nada lands in Los Angeles hoping for work. He overhears a street preacher claiming that shadowy figures have enlisted the wealthy elite to enslave humanity. Nada lands a job on a construction crew and bonds with a coworker, Frank, who offers him a spot in a shantytown next to a church. There, Nada meets the local leader, Gilbert. A pirate TV broadcast interrupts programming, declaring that humans are being treated like livestock and that the only way to see the truth is to destroy the signal at its source. Viewers suffer headaches from the transmission. Nada tails Gilbert and the preacher into the church, where a looped gospel recording masks a secret meeting with the hacker and others. He stumbles upon hidden equipment and crates but flees after colliding with the preacher. Police raid the shantytown and church, brutally beating the hacker and preacher. Nada snatches one of the crates, removes a pair of sunglasses, and hides the crate in trash. The glasses show the world in black and white, exposing subliminal commands to obey and consume, and reveal that many people are actually bug-eyed aliens wearing human disguises. The aliens use wristwatch communicators to teleport and deploy surveillance drones. When aliens in a grocery store realize Nada can see them, he kills two alien cops, takes their weapons, and storms a bank, gunning down several alien employees. He grabs a human hostage, Holly Thompson, to escape, but she shoves him out a window. Later, Holly finds the glasses Nada dropped on her floor.

Production

The film is based on Ray Nelson's short story "Eight O'Clock in the Morning" from the November 1963 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and a comics adaptation titled "Nada" illustrated by Bill Wray that appeared in Alien Encounters in April 1986. Carpenter described the story as a D.O.A.-type tale where a man is hypnotized and realizes aliens control humanity, with only until eight o'clock in the morning to solve the problem. He acquired film rights to both the story and the comic. Carpenter used the pseudonym "Frank Armitage" for the screenplay, an allusion to H. P. Lovecraft's character Henry Armitage, as Carpenter felt kinship with Lovecraft's worldview of a hidden world. For the role of Nada, Carpenter sought an everyman who looked like he had lived a hard life, and after meeting professional wrestler Roddy Piper at WrestleMania III in 1987, he was convinced Piper was right, noting Piper's broken body from his career. Carpenter wrote the role of Frank specifically for Keith David, impressed by David's performance in The Thing and wanting someone who could hold his own.

Reception

On Rotten Tomatoes, They Live has an approval rating of 86% based on 76 reviews, with the critical consensus calling it a politically subversive blend of horror and sci-fi. Metacritic gives a weighted average rating of 55 out of 100 based on 22 reviews, indicating mixed or average reviews. Jonathan Rosenbaum of the Chicago Reader praised Carpenter's wit and storytelling craft but noted the script takes shortcuts and explores its central concept only cursorily. Jay Carr of The Boston Globe felt the film starts strong with throwback visuals but runs low on imagination, though he compared it favorably to Terminator and RoboCop. Janet Maslin of The New York Times found the film's flatness and crazy inconsistency disappointing given Carpenter's apparent attempt to make a point. Richard Harrington of The Washington Post criticized the plot as full of black holes, the acting as wretched, and the effects as second-rate. Rick Groen of The Globe and Mail wrote that the social commentary wipes clean with a dry towelette and is lighter-than-air. The 2012 documentary The Pervert's Guide to Ideology, presented by Slavoj Žižek, begins with an analysis of They Live, using its sunglasses concept to explain ideology.

Legacy

Entertainment Weekly placed They Live at number 18 on its 2008 list of the most essential cult movies from 1983 onward. The fight between Roddy Piper's Nada and Keith David's Frank Armitage landed at number seven on Rotten Tomatoes' ranking of the greatest fight scenes ever. That brawl inspired Darren Aronofsky's 2008 film The Wrestler, which he saw as a spoof, and South Park parodied it in the episode "Cripple Fight." Artist Shepard Fairey credits the movie as a major influence, noting its logo resembles his Andre the Giant Has a Posse campaign and that the film gave him the idea for the word "obey." The 1991 video game The Simpsons: Bart vs. the Space Mutants includes a reference where Bart dons special sunglasses to spot aliens. Novelist Jonathan Lethem calls it one of his favorite eighties movies and wrote a full book about it for the Soft Skull Press Deep Focus series. In the 2013 game Saints Row IV, Piper and David voiced fictional versions of themselves in a parody of their fight. Music videos by Green Day, Anti-Flag, and David Banner with 9th Wonder all pay tribute to the film. P.O.S. mixed scenes from They Live into his song "Roddy Piper" on his 2017 album Chill, Dummy. In July 2018, the film was chosen for the Venice Classics section at the 75th Venice International Film Festival.