So, John Carpenter's allegory of the evils of capitalism and consumerism isn't exactly subtle, but in the so-called "Decade of Excess" where positive representations of the American businessman ran rampant in every form of media, who can blame him for screaming at the top of his lungs at the absurdity of it all?  With his typically adept 'scope compositions, he creates a world which appears similar to the urban climate of the 1980s but whose excessive advertising and promotion of capitalist endeavors function as a veil covering up an alien takeover of the United States.  Nada (Roddy Piper) comes across a pair of sunglasses which allow him to peer beneath the veneer and see to the core of a consumer culture which is slowly enslaving the population by making them dependant on products they don't need.  Through these glasses, magazine advertisements say simply "Obey" while a billboard for a tropical vacation says (to paraphrase) "Consume and reproduce" - messages that are engrained in all consumer cultures which thrive on conformity and order, but that normally remain beneath the surface.  While the concept could grow tiresome over the course of a feature-length film, the revolutionaries who are behind the distribution of the sunglasses make for an interesting counter-balance to the heavy-handed social commentary.  Their struggle to force people to see what they're blind to brings the necessary tension to the film, giving added weight and tension to the action sequences.  The brilliant centerpiece of the film - a fight between Nada and a co-worker he's trying to help see past the facade - begins as a battle between knowledge and ignorance, but is extended to such an absurd length (complete with grunting and bad sound effects) that it transforms into an allegory of the lengths to which rational people will go to retain the status quo in their lives.  Carpenter's ability to fuse the bawdy humor and action with an intelligent script make for a genre film that is both thoughtful and entertaining and by not making the mistake of representing every businessman or consumer as an alien, he avoids condenscension, instead making the aliens presence seem like a virus infecting the reasoning of otherwise intelligent people.