They Live is a science fiction horror film, which was directed by John Carpenter. It was released to the cinemas in the USA on 4 November 1988.[1] Based on the 1963 short story "Eight O'Clock in the Morning" by Ray Nelson. Starring Roddy Piper, Keith David, and Meg Foster, the film follows a drifter who discovers through special sunglasses that the ruling class are blue aliens concealing their appearance and manipulating people to consume, breed, and conform to the status quo via subliminal messages in mass media.
After acquiring the film rights to Nelson's short story before producing They Live, Carpenter crafted the screenplay's structure around the story, writing it under the pseudonym "Frank Armitage." Carpenter has expressed that the film's themes arose from his discontent with the economic policies of the then-U.S. President Ronald Reagan and the growing commercialization he observed in popular culture and politics.
Plot[]
Nada, a homeless man, arrives in Los Angeles, California, in search of employment. He encounters a preacher who warns that "they" have enlisted the wealthy and powerful to dominate humanity. Securing a job at a construction site, he befriends Frank, a coworker who offers him shelter in a nearby shantytown and introduces him to Gilbert.
A hacker interrupts television broadcasts, claiming humanity is being herded like "cattle" and that freedom lies in disabling the signal's source. Viewers of the broadcast experience headaches. Nada follows Gilbert and the preacher into the church, where he stumbles upon a meeting with the hacker and others. He spots various equipment and boxes but flees when the preacher notices him. Both the shantytown and church are razed by a police raid, with the hacker and preacher suffering police brutality.
Nada recovers a box from the church, extracting a pair of sunglasses and concealing the box in a trash heap. The glasses reveal a monochromatic world, exposing media subliminal messages to consume and conform, and unmasking many individuals as blue grotesque, bug-eyed aliens in disguise. These beings possess wristwatch communicators for teleportation and control surveillance drones. When the aliens realize Nada can see them, two alien officers confront him. Nada eliminates them, seizes their weapons, and storms a bank, identifying several employees and patrons as aliens. After a violent encounter, he flees, taking Holly Thompson hostage. He attempts to convince her with the glasses, but she ejects him through a window.
As Nada retrieves another pair of sunglasses, Frank, believing Nada to be a threat, confronts him to deliver his paycheck. Nada's attempt to share the glasses leads to a fierce fight, but he eventually succeeds in showing Frank the truth.
The pair encounter Gilbert, who introduces them to the human resistance. They receive contact lenses to replace the sunglasses and discover that the aliens are exploiting global warming to terraform Earth to resemble their own planet, depleting its resources in the process. They also uncover that the aliens have been bribing humans to collaborate with them. Holly suddenly arrives at the meeting with information about the signal's source and apologizes to Nada for her previous actions, claiming ignorance of the situation. However, the meeting is soon raided by the police, resulting in numerous casualties and scattering the survivors. Trapped in an alley, Nada and Frank use an alien wristwatch to open a portal to the aliens' spaceport beneath Cable 54, a news network controlled by the aliens.
Stumbling upon a gathering of aliens and human collaborators celebrating the suppression of the "terrorists," they meet a drifter from the shantytown who, believing them to be new recruits, shows them around the facility. Cable 54 is where the aliens broadcast a transmitter that conceals their presence and subliminal messages from humans. Nada and Frank locate Holly and battle their way to the roof's transmitter. However, Holly, a collaborator behind the raid, fatally shoots Frank. Nada retaliates by killing Holly and destroying the transmitter, but not before he is critically injured by a police helicopter. As the signal dies down, Nada defiantly gestures with the middle finger before succumbing to his wounds.
Simultaneously, people worldwide begin to see the aliens who have been living among them.
Trivia[]
- John Carpenter states that the Blue Aliens are meant to reflect his pessimistic views on the consumerist nature and Trickle Down component of Reagonomics and nothing more than that. Carpenter stresses that They Live is not meant to spread fear and paranoia over literal aliens from space invading earth and subjugating the human race. Carpenter denounced neo-Nazis who misinterpret They Live as sympathetic to their ideologies of ethnocentrism and anti-Semitism.
- The fate of the blue aliens is unknown, though it is unequivocal that they were eradicated from the Earth with no trace of them ever being on the planet.