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It’s not that I don’t wholeheartedly agree with Carpenter’s assessment. In fact, as bad as it was in 1988, just look around you today. How many people do you know who would go into immediate anaphylaxis without their smart phone. With no way to manage their Starbucks points and publicly obsess over the inevitability of middle age weight gain on Facebook, many of us wouldn’t have a damn thing to do all day. Nobody knows the difference between news and entertainment anymore. We let our leaders manipulate us with our own fears, and we soothe ourselves at the mass media teat. We rely on corporate America to assure us that yes, we matter and yes, as long as we keep spending money, we’re always doing the right thing. Dear God, it’s worse than I thought. It’s gotten so bad, if aliens wanted to invade they could just walk right in and take over, and we’d all be too busy tittering at cat pictures to notice!

It is this very metaphor that forms the centerpiece of the film. I think that’s pretty cool. What’s not is everything else.

Nada’s hunt for work leads him to a construction site, where he befriends a man of similarly strong moral fiber in a fellow construction worker named Frank (Keith David). The two develop an immediate and very plot-friendly bond that serves them well throughout the story. All too often, Frank extends an inappropriate level of trust to Nada, not because it makes any sense - but because it’s his role to do that. They Live isn’t populated with characters, it’s infested with plot contrivances. But really, that’s fine. It’s not very imaginative, but it’s still a valid way to tell a story, right? Besides, Mr. Carpenter has been doing what he does for a long time, and because of The Thing and Big Trouble in Little China, I’m willing to trust him.

Moving on, Frank and Nada put down roots in an oddball urban shantytown that looks like a Syrian refugee camp because that’s what happens to hard working people in a diseased society like ours. While investigating mysterious goings on in and around Camp Oddball, Nada comes into possession of a strange pair of sunglasses that allow him to…”see” (or “unsee” depending on your point of view) certain things that others can’t. I won’t spoil the details except to say that the metaphor will be obvious. If you think what I said before was nuts, how would you feel about the inexorable decay of Western civilization if you could literally see it with your own eyes, rather than waiting for some shrieking AM radio personality (or internet columnist) to tell you about it?

It’s a pretty cool idea, even if we never do find out exactly why these incredible pieces of eyewear even exist. They just DO, okay? It’s all part of the unapologetically allegorical nature of this movie. Okay, so now that he’s got your attention, what will Mr. Carpenter do with it? He’s got the human race devolving into compliant sheep without even realizing it. He has many salient observations about our society’s obsession with self-indulgence. Add in a spectacularly mulleted hero, best known for his aforementioned kilt-rocking ability, and you have the potential makings of a kick ass sci-fi horror/satire. That is, unless of course, you’d like to go a different route and make the last two thirds it a mess of glacial pacing, pointless exposition and lazy sleight-of-hand.

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