They Live

You know how sci-fi movies from the 1950s served as an allegory for the Red Scare and the Cold War? That lurking fear of "the enemy" being on your very doorstep, leaving you helpless to stop them? Turns out that allegory didn't completely disappear when McCarthy did.

Made during Reagan's second term as President, John Carpenter's They Live serves as a Carpenter's frustrations towards the former's policies. Granted, the 1980s were already a stressful and angry time but Carpenter was especially frustrated. (He still is all these years later.)

It wasn't just Reagnomics that Carpenter was pissed off at. As shown throughout They Live, he got annoyed at the mass (and crass) commercialism of the era. In anyone else's hands, the conveying of that frustration would've been clumsy and heavy-handed; Carpenter makes his irritation very clear.

Worrying still is that nearly forty years later, They Live is just as relevant as ever. With the internet and social media becoming present in everyday life, it makes the movie's message of hidden conspiracies all the more unsettling. (Fiction becoming fact...)

They Live shows that sometimes history is regularly doomed to repeat itself. The original offenders may be long gone but their actions still linger. But as also shown here, all it takes is someone seeing the awful truth to spark both a change and a revolution.

My Rating: ****1/2