They Live

I'm a little sad about They Live, because just a few years ago it was this unknown cult movie that was like this amazing find if you were of a certain persuasion in movie tastes and social views. And I'm not one for hoarding up good movies or anything, but it seems like it more and more started to become a hipster movie in this decade, and I was shocked to find out the other day that Universal is actually trying to acquire the rights from John Carpenter to make a remake of it. They apparently want to give it to the guy who did the 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead (which I felt was glossy crap) or the guy who did the recent Children of Men (which I haven't seen, but got a lot of good recommendations, but also sounds like it's way too Serious Business as compared to They Live.)

The thing is, no remake can work, regardless of how well or poorly these directors do. It's only a question of how bad/watchable it'll be. It'll never surpass or replace the original, people who loved the original will maybe watch the remake once and then never bother with it again, and newcomers will just want to see what the original was all about and will probably end up liking it better. It's a John Carpenter flick, you can remake his movies, but you just can't re-capture his particular quirky, 1980s, low-budget-seeming charm, or really improve on it in any way. His movies are like a 1980s time capsule, to remind us when major studios were free to be a little more experimental and a little less polished versus the slick CGI formulaic crap we keep getting now.



Another part of that charm is that it is just so rough around the edges, and no major studio would ever let that sort of thing slide these days in this crazily profit-driven world. Now that "Rowdy" Roddy Piper has played the lead role, no one can really replace him, and he's way too long in the tooth to do the job again. Nor should he be asked to.



The "rough around the edges" quality of the original movie really works here because of the subject matter - Piper's character, Nada, is a homeless drifter forced into these circumstances by jobs drying up left and right. And this is really one of the only movies that I can remember that actually accurately portrays the world of homelessness and transient labor in major urban centers in the United States. The opening scene sees Nada hopping off a freight train in L.A. that he no doubt stowed away on - still a commonly used means of transport for today's marginalized and fringe dwellers. He's got maybe a bit too much of the ol' bronzed Adonis gym body and the well-kept mane to be totally buyable as a transient, but everything else about him and everything around him is spot on. He's got some old plain sensible work clothes, a giant backpack carrying what's left of his possessions (mostly tools for work), and a sleeping bag strapped to the top. His venture into L.A. begins by walking down a road with no sidewalk, awkwardly stepping over rocks and big chunks of gravel (and you'll have to have lived with no car in a place not designed with pedestrians and public transit in mind to understand why this seeming throwaway scene is vital to developing the experience.) He eventually wanders onto a construction site and can only get a job by calling a poor bluff on the part of the foreman (another scene even big fans will likely not get unless they've been poor themselves and had to sniff around for low-level trabajo just to get by in America). He then hooks up with a homeless encampment based on a shanty town that actually existed in 1985, and rather than the wino/crackhead stereotypes that the media feeds us constantly as constituting "the homeless", you just see this myraid of poor, displaced working people doing the best they can to cobble together a functional community with what little they have.


"You dirty mutha fucka!"

From there, of course, the movie gets a little crazier with hi-tech sunglasses that are able to see through the disguises of aliens among us who are feeding off of us and using us clandestinely as an army of slaves and cattle. This is actually where I feel the social commentary starts to fall apart as the real predators get a pass in favor of some wild David Icke-esque shit, but admittedly it makes for a fun movie romp.

I feel like the movie is already kind of getting worn out with overexposure so I don't even want to bother describing all the great scenes and aspects that you'll see gone over in all sorts of other places. I'm willing to wager on one thing, though - if they do make a remake, they'll water down the social commentary even more, making sure to make it one of those "we just need the Good Rich to replace the Bad Rich and all will be well" type deals to try to remove what little in the way of teeth that the original had and fractionally decrease the possibility of torch-wielding mobs showing up at the doors of America's most indulgent as the economic and social situation continues to get worse here.