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Comment by beebeepka | Hacker News Reader

I've had bad luck showing They Live to youngsters. I don't know if it's the style or the message but they all seemed bored to death.

I love it but then again I am a borderline paranoid old fart

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Range is something you develop later in life, or not at all. Young people in each generation like mostly stuff that is made for them.

There are people who say "2001: A Space Odyssey" is unwatchable because it has low pace. They just don't have patience to watch a movie like that and they take out their phone to do something during the scene.

It was unwatchable because it relied on you having read the book to know what was going on. I would usually recommend reading the book and skipping the movie.

We are also much busier these days. Asking someone to spend time watching 2001 is asking for a lot.

2001 was intentionally slow to make you feel how boring space travel is. It's a clever idea but it's a movie for a much slower paced world with fewer options for things to do.

Probably. The same trick of deliberately boring the viewer for creating a sense of immersion had been used 19 years before, in the (excellent) film 'Stray dog'.

My cousin has had the same reaction when showing anything he liked as a kid to his kids. I believe things like pacing, dialog, time-era and camera work are something that they can't get over. I remember a time when I couldn't stand Westerns, 60/70s movies and anything that was monochrome. Then, about high school age I started really enjoying cinema and animation. I watch even the worst of B-cinema movies with joy.

In the end, I felt this way about cowboy movies because I couldn't relate to the time/age depicted. It felt like a long long time ago that I didn't understand or want to. I believe today's kids feel the same way. No smartphone? No computers? Ancient tube TVs? People meeting up and talking instead of using discord or whatever? I can see why today's kids just don't enjoy the movies of 30+ years ago. The time presented in the movies is completely foreign to them despite it being no so long ago but in reality, culturally, it was long ago.

I have found that with film, music or art, young people (or anyone really) have to be receptive before they're able to appreciate the experience. It just won't "click" if they're not ready. I've tried. I've tried to get youngsters excited about "the canon" of great cinema (yes, I consider John Carpenter to be on the short list for must-see horror films).

There's no easy way to encourage receptivity. The best thing you can do is to just be accessible when it happens and be ready to discuss.

I watched it a couple years ago at age 19 and didn't like it (rated it 1.5 out of 5 stars according to my stats). From my memory:

- The all-macho, no-internal-monologue protagonist is really dull and dated. The one liners are lame, most of his problems are solved via fist or gun. The kind of unaware character parodied by Duke Nukem.

- The concept of waking up and seeing through lies of the media is banal, and now associated with teenagers and stoners. Everyone knows that advertising and the news are run by agendas.

- The media has changed. When we think of someone being brainwashed by the media we think of the all-encompassing internet, not billboards and newspapers. A billboard being revealed to say CONSUME and OBEY has the subtlety of an overly-labelled-political-comic. The specific imagery has been appropriated by fashion brands, advertisers, and artists like Banksy endlessly. I remember OBEY sweatshirts and hats being everywhere in middle school.

- The specific plot, 'a guy discovers the media is run by a conspiracy of aliens so he teams up with a friend to shoot up a tv station', is today more reminiscent of a number of mass shootings and anti-semitic conspiracies than anti-capitalist revolution.

I have friends that like the movie for what it is, but I wouldn't expect the average young person to be enamored with it without a lot of historical context (yuppies, Reaganism, the role of the red scare in classic sci-fi, Edward Bernays, analog synthesizers, etc).

> Everyone knows that advertising and the news are run by agendas.

I really want to emphasise this point. The reason They Live might not resonate with younger audiences is they've already internalised its message. Ironically, mass culture has been the greatest disseminator of the ideas the film has about mass culture.

I watched it for the first time last year and had a lot of the same opinions, and I'm significantly older. I still think the general concept can be good, it's just that this version hasn't aged that well and could benefit from a modern reimagining.

A great, but awkward, feature of the film is that it starts off feeling like a rather earnest documentary about urban poverty, and then gets bigger and more sensational throughout the movie. It doesn't surprise me that some people get put off by the beginning.

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