THEY LIVE - A John Carpenter film and cult classic: It was regarded by1988 audiences as mostly science fiction but in 2009 it looks like a documentary.
The opening minutes set the tone of the national economy when a homeless job-seeker (Nada) remarks to the employment clerk: "...Denver lost 14 banks in two weeks". So what else did Carpenter know in 1988 that will be history tomorrow?
The story is inspired by Ray Nelson's 1963 short story "Eight O’Clock in the Morning" where a hypnotist accidently restores "Nada" to a state of full wakefullness where he is able to see the cloaked ruling class of aliens in their natural reptilian form.
The alien Fascinators use television broadcasts to make the media a message of hypnosis over their earthling viewers except for Nada who succeeds in awakening a revolution by exposing the Fascinators to the entire human audience as evil cold-blooded lizards enslaving the human race.
Carpenter drops the "reptilian" alien form but builds on Nelson's plot by introducing a third "complicit" ruling class of humans who've been bribed and granted alien privelages in return for loyalty.
The population's "awakening" in They Live comes at a painfully slow rate of one person at a time through sunglasses fitted with special "Hoffman" lenses that filter the mind control signals embedded in the television broadcast. The bigger problem is finding people willing to wake up by looking through the lenses (take the red pill). The ultimate solution was to destroy the mind control device, revealing the aliens in their ghoulish appearance to millions of viewers. In the end the glass encased mind control oscillator proves vulnerable to handgun rounds fired into it by Nada in his dying scene.
Carpenter makes his point brilliantly following a firefight scene when the aliens refer to the human resistors as "terrorists".
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THEY LIVE - Full length video
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The opening minutes set the tone of the national economy when a homeless job-seeker (Nada) remarks to the employment clerk: "...Denver lost 14 banks in two weeks". So what else did Carpenter know in 1988 that will be history tomorrow?
The story is inspired by Ray Nelson's 1963 short story "Eight O’Clock in the Morning" where a hypnotist accidently restores "Nada" to a state of full wakefullness where he is able to see the cloaked ruling class of aliens in their natural reptilian form.
The alien Fascinators use television broadcasts to make the media a message of hypnosis over their earthling viewers except for Nada who succeeds in awakening a revolution by exposing the Fascinators to the entire human audience as evil cold-blooded lizards enslaving the human race.
Carpenter drops the "reptilian" alien form but builds on Nelson's plot by introducing a third "complicit" ruling class of humans who've been bribed and granted alien privelages in return for loyalty.
The population's "awakening" in They Live comes at a painfully slow rate of one person at a time through sunglasses fitted with special "Hoffman" lenses that filter the mind control signals embedded in the television broadcast. The bigger problem is finding people willing to wake up by looking through the lenses (take the red pill). The ultimate solution was to destroy the mind control device, revealing the aliens in their ghoulish appearance to millions of viewers. In the end the glass encased mind control oscillator proves vulnerable to handgun rounds fired into it by Nada in his dying scene.
Carpenter makes his point brilliantly following a firefight scene when the aliens refer to the human resistors as "terrorists".
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THEY LIVE - Full length video
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