And if a pair of glasses could tell us horrible things, how would we react? This 1989 feature film, still as relevant today, is coming out in theaters and will have you glued to your seat!
On April 12, Splendor Films offers a retrospective of 5 films by maestro John Carpenter in 4K restored version: Dark Star, Invasion Los Angeles, New York 1997, Prince of Darkness and Fog.
Among these titles, Invasion Los Angeles is undoubtedly John Carpenter’s most visionary and captivating work.
Note that the 4K restoration of this film was carried out in 2018 by the Silvercast laboratory in Great Britain, with the collaboration of Studio Canal. She was also supervised by the film’s own cinematographer, Gary B. Kibbe.
In Invasion Los Angeles, Carpenter introduces us to John, an unemployed worker. The latter, played by Roddy Piper, discovers a discreet group that manufactures dark glasses.
Intrigued, he tries on a pair and discovers a frightening world: many humans are actually aliens with ugly, skinned faces; billboards order submission in Big Brother terms.
With another worker, he confronts the invaders. But what game is playing Holly, the seductive program manager of channel 54?
Released in the late 1980s, right in the Reagan years, Invasion Los Angeles blasts a confident and dominating America. For Liberation, this film is a “violent charge against Reagan politics, a vitriolic portrait of an apathetic America.”
According to Les Inrockuptibles, Carpenter’s work is a “dazzling political pamphlet and a great visionary film.” To write his screenplay, John Carpenter was inspired by the short story The Fascinatorswritten by Ray Faraday Nelson.
DR Roddy Piper
A VISIONARY PAPHLET
If the film still seems so relevant today, it is particularly through its subversive dimension linked to its acerbic criticism of capitalism and the media. Capitalism is described as a system of exploitation of the poor and an oppressed majority.
A small oligarchy of aliens imposes its domination over humans with the collaboration of a handful of them, rewarded with money or power in exchange for their servility.
Moreover, the idea of the pair of glasses which reveals to the hero the truth of this world is an excellent metaphor for distilling a bitter charge against the media and mass manipulation.
For Carpenter, the message is clear, a large part of the media world participates in the lobotomization of the people and their enslavement, in particular via the permanent incentive to consume.
DR
BRAINWASHING
A skillfully orchestrated brainwashing represented by the advertisements that can be deciphered when John Nada puts on his glasses: “Obey”, “Consume”, “Marry yourself and procreate”, “Abandon all imagination”…
At the time, the director’s desire was to fire red balls at Reaganomics (the economic policies of US President Ronald Reagan during the 1980s).
In the United States, the work received a mixed reception. Jay Carr, journalist at the Boston Globe writes in particular that Invasion Los Angeles, “as a sci-fi horror comedy, is in the same class as Terminator et Robocopeven though his hero doesn’t wear bionic biceps.”
DR
For his part, Richard Harrington, of the Washington Post, is less complimentary: “It’s just John Carpenter, as usual, trying to dig deep with a toy shovel. The film’s plot is full of black holes, the acting is miserable, the effects are second rate.”
However, Invasion Los Angeles is doing quite well at the box office. Filmed on a modest budget of 4 million dollars, it brought in 13 million greenbacks in the USA. In France, it attracted 177,294 spectators when it was released in April 1989.
