In 1985, 20th Century Fox tried to convince audiences to go to the theater and see a tender story of connection between an all-American fighter pilot and a pregnant nonbinary enemy combatant by wrapping its loving heart in Homeric violence and space pew-pew dogfights.
It mostly did not work, and Enemy Mine has become an obscure science fiction film, remembered mostly for bombing at the box office. I come before you today to remind you of its lineage, the unlikelihood of its existence, and to put it in its rightful place among the great film adaptations of award-winning genre stories.
In 1979, Barry Longyear published the novella “Enemy Mine” in Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine. Longyear would republish and collect it, writing two more stories in the same universe, and winning the Nebula and Hugo awards for novella that year. The course of adaptation hardly ever runs smooth, and British director Richard Loncraine exited the production of the film adaptation early on, citing creative differences. The German Wolfgang Peterson (Neverending Story) took over, moving production from Budapest to Munich, and starting over with principal photography. Already deep in the red, this film was in trouble from the start.
Our heroes are also in trouble from the start: we open on a laser battle in space, with fighter pilots shooting energy weapons at one another while protagonist Willis Davidge (Dennis Quaid) and copilot Joey Wooster (Lance Kerwin) inform us (with the help of some clumsy narration) that Bilateral Terran Alliance (BTA) is at war with the Dracs over territory and resources, having grown tired of fighting over the same on Earth. The Dracs are a reptilian humanoid species, but Davidge has never seen one, he confesses as he kills several in combat. A barely-there Black woman pilot is killed, and Davidge reacts out of a need for vengeance by pursuing the ship responsible into the atmosphere of a nearby planet.
After crash-landing and finding his copilot dead, Davidge sets out to hunt down the Drac pilot, whom he saw eject. The two struggle for dominance, but are distracted from killing one another by a meteor shower and the local wildlife. With no other choice, they decide to get to know each other. Our Drac is Jeriba Shigan (Louis Gossett Jr.) but Davidge calls them Jerry. Jerry and Davidge are standoffish at first, insulting one another’s values and reenacting the interstellar war in miniature.
This middle part of the film is where all its lively heart beats, and where all its most difficult and rewarding work is done. We see Davidge become interested in Jerry’s theology and philosophy, which they read from a tiny book they wear on a necklace. Together, they read verses about refusing to answer violence with violence, about the benevolent nature of responding with love to those who hate you. Despite the extensive prosthetics and complex phonology Gosset is working with, the actor does a remarkable job of making Jerry relatable, likable, and sympathetic. Quaid, in turn, shows us the softening effect that any bigot undergoes when he is confronted with an individual rather than a monolith he’s encouraged to hate out of generalized bias. The two open to one another, while still struggling for survival and building a hut out of turtle shells.
The struggle is real as winter bears down on their planet, and as Davidge discovers that scavenger teams who enslave Dracs for labor have been visiting nearby. Driven apart by cabin fever, the pair are reunited by fear and necessity. Just when it seems it might be the two of them against the world until they both die, Jerry tells Davidge they’re pregnant.
Here, we have to engage with the film’s sexuality. Though early dialogue between Davidge and his BTA comrades constructs compulsory heterosexuality in workplace banter before the crash, Davidge makes no declaration or expression of his own. He leaves behind no wife and no girlfriend. His whole life gradually shifts from hope of rescue from this planet to building a life with Jerry. Announcing a pregnancy to the only other person around usually means that pregnancy was jointly created. Indeed, Davidge reacts with the expectant joy and incredulity of a new father. Though Davidge uses “it” as his pronoun to describe Jerry, the 1985 audience knew they were watching a performance between two men; Quaid and Gossett were established actors at the time. The result is the genesis of a queer family, any way we measure it. The two castaways have been intimate in sharing space and food and care, and they will soon share a new life.
Dracs reproduce asexually, and it seems they have little control over when self-fertilization takes place. Davidge seems amazed but apprehensive about what’s to come. Jerry focuses entirely on the most important ritual of their people: a recitation of lineage that explains where a Drac comes from and how they arise from their line. Struggling to equivocate and make sense of each other, Jerry gets Davidge to tell his own family line, made more complex by having had two parents. Davidge listens to Jerry’s in return. This is vitally important to Jerry, who will (of course, since this is genre fiction) die in childbirth. Davidge will have to retain this information, and will also have to care for the child.
By the halfway point of this film, it becomes difficult to believe it’s a movie from 1985. These combatants engage with one another on bases of race and gender that we’re still fighting for today, as if they were alien worlds with which we have never yet attempted to make peace. Nonbinary ace icon Jerry says, without equivocation as they prepare to bring forth life, “I’m not a woman.” Armed with the startling knowledge that all people are people, Davidge has begun to learn the Drac language. That’s good, because he’s going to need it. Jerry dies, leaving baby Zammis (Bumper Robinson) in the Terran’s barely-capable care.
When this movie came out in 1985, it was seeking its audience in Star Trek fans, who had shown they could engage critically with race and gender in science fiction since 1966. However, Enemy Mine was too early for fans of Alien Nation, which wouldn’t come along until 1989 and put mpreg on the small screen for the average American family to ponder and talk about at the water cooler. Star Trek: the Next Generation wouldn’t air its controversial episode “The Outcast,” until 1992, wherein the Enterprise crew would encounter a planet to whom all gender performance is criminalized. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine would come along just one year after that, featuring a main cast member who was a woman but carried within an immortal omnisexual slug, and who had been a man just a few years before.
So, too, did the ‘90s iteration of Star Trek deal with the complications that arise from cross-racial adoption. Like other sci-fi children who grapple with the difference between who they live with and who they came from, Zammis lines up his three-fingered and clawed hand beside Davidge’s human one, and wishes he were different, wishes he were the same. Star Trek: TNG showed us Klingon, Betazoid, Cardassian, and Bajoran biracial kids who struggled in the same way. Those writers dealt with the loss of identity and stability that come from it, and the inability to separate their existence from the war, occupation, economic inequality, and racism that often cause it to exist.
But Enemy Mine got there first.
Written science fiction has always been decades ahead of both film and television, acting as a guide and a precursor to the more widely-seen types of media. Stories and novellas like Longyear’s “Enemy Mine” are like tugboats, small and mighty, dragging the barges of tv and movies out into sea. The mass of the mainstream is tough to get moving, but a stout tugboat always does its job despite the tides.
The tides were against Enemy Mine when it reached theaters. Packed with tension absent from the original novella and advertised as an action movie in space, it found its audience among fans of Star Wars; a franchise so aggressively cisnormative and heterosexual that they’d rather let a brother and sister make out than try any other arrangement, even among alien sluglords.
In the end, Enemy Mine is a sensitive sci-fi tearjerker about a bigot who sees the error of his ways, adopts the child of a genderqueer foe, and teaches that child both his own ways and the ways of the child’s lost world. In the emotional conclusion, Davidge presents himself on the Drac homeworld to recite Zammis’ litany to unite the child with his people, he does so selflessly, wanting only to repair what war and interstellar commerce have damaged. When Zammis recites his own child’s lineage, they include Davidge’s name in the line of those who brought them into the world.
Sometimes, a movie does not fail because it was in any way lacking. Art is sometimes spent too soon on an audience that is not ready to receive it.
But we might be ready now.
Enemy Mine is available for streaming on nearly every platform. Put it on when you need soft, loving sci-fi about ace and queer parenthood, or to feel some hope that a better world is not only possible, but a dream we’ve been sharing for a very long time.
I thought this was a terrific movie when I first saw it in 1985, and I still think so now. Gossett’s performance was outstanding.
This must have come out after I left for basic training in May 0f 85. I know I read the story, but have no memory of the movie.
I could swear I saw a tv show that transposed this idea to WW2 in the Pacific with US and Japanese pilots.
You’re probably thinking of John Boorman’s Hell in the Pacific (1968) starring Lee Marvin and Toshiro Mifune. Longyear’s original novella was inspired by that film, which he was always up front about. 1965’s None But the Brave, starring Frank Sinatra, is similar, but involves several American and Japanese soldiers or sailors trying to survive together. Enemy Mine has a happier ending than either of those movies.
That sounds right.
It’s weird, I could swear I’ve commented on a post about this movie before on this site, that I rewatched it specifically so that I could comment in the thread, but I can’t track it down. I find various columns that include it in a list, but none with comments from me. Maybe it was a long digression in a comment thread about something else.
Anyway, my recollection was that the middle of the film was quite good, but the beginning was bad (with surprisingly crude space-battle FX from ILM) and the ending was bad. They threw out the original novella’s more nuanced ending in favor of an overblown action climax (a mine battle demanded by a network executive who was unable to understand the meaning of the title and insisted there had to be a mine in Enemy Mine) and an overly pat happy ending that glosses over all the challenging questions raised by the main body of the film. It could’ve been a great film, but the beginning and ending ruin it.
I tried to find it (also could swear that there was a post here that made me rediscover this movie) and I think it may be this one: Star Trek: Enterprise Rewatch: “Dawn” – Reactor
Oh, yes, that’s the one. Reposting my comments from there:
Basically, it’s 2/3 of a pretty great film bracketed by 1/3 of a pretty bad film. The opening space battle sequence is badly acted, designed, and shot, with the FX so mediocre I was surprised to see that ILM did them. Once our two leads crash on the planet, though, the production values improve with impressive creature effects by Chris Walas, and the story of the two enemies initially hating each other, then cooperating to survive on a hostile planet, bonding, and eventually becoming dear friends is effective and ultimately rather moving. Lou Gossett gives a fantastic performance as Jeriba, and though Dennis Quaid is a bit broad, he’s pretty good and has a good rapport with Gossett. The alien culture is nicely drawn, and the makeup and performance techniques to make the actors as alien as possible are effective (though the way the makeup just has a big hole in it so you could see the actor’s mouth always bugged me).
But in the final act, it falls apart. It turns into an overdone action movie as Davidge fights the slavers, and all the stuff set up in the first two acts about the territorial war between humans and Dracs and the bitter enmity between them is just ignored in favor of a pat, rushed happy ending. In my distorted memory, I thought that Davidge was rescued and had to try to stop his military cohorts from killing Jeriba or the child, or something like that, but the military’s suspicion of his possible collaboration with the enemy is barely touched on and then forgotten at the end. It’s quite incoherent, and a very disappointing payoff to something that was really quite compelling most of the way through.
ILM worked on the project under Richard Loncraine. When Wolfgang Petersen took over he threw out almost all of their footage, had most of the models redesigned, and brought in German FX artists. If you can hunt down Cinefex #23, the whole ordeal is well-documented there.
Love the tugboat analogy.
I saw part of this movie long time ago. It´s a core memory.
I was seven or eight, I think; there was an older boy babysitting me while our mothers went out. They said no TV. I was a good little girl; he knew I´d probably snitch. We were no friends: he was just mum´s friend´s son. But he tried. “There´s this movie on right now and I just have to watch it,” he said. So we watched it. We missed whole first half of it, I think; all I remember clearly was the scene with the alien giving birth. I never told mother, nor anyone else.
I was really curious about the rest of the movie, but I didn´t know the title – and this was nineties, so, no google.
I finally watched it couple of years ago, probably thanks to some article on this site. And wow, it is so strange! In a good way. Back then, it was one of the very first sci-fi movies I saw, so, my understanding of the genre was formed by it, along with Superman and Star Trek: Motion Picture and one random episode of Twilight zone. :D
I love this movie. Thank you for reminding me that it’s time for another rewatch.
BTW, you didn’t mention that the soundtrack is by the legendary Maurice Jarre, and is fantastic as usual.
I came here to make the same observation. Regardless of what one thinks of the movie, it looks like garbage, especially the production design and effects work. ILM typically had an ironclad contract that they got effects credit regardless if little or none of their work was used.
I thought most of the movie’s FX looked good by the standards of the era, except for the opening space battle. The Drac makeup was very good except for the weird little hole for Gossett’s mouth, which always made it feel too mask-like for me and broke the otherwise effective illusion.
Thanks for the article! This is one of my favorite sci-fi movies. I remember first seeing it on cable or VHS, maybe a year or two after it came out. I have long been captivated by how different it was from other SF of the time, and by the performances (Quaid and Robinson are very good, Gossett is amazing). The action sequence to rescue Zammis is clunky, to be sure, but I love how it concludes, with Zammis’ comment on the changed appearance of “Uncle.”
I saw this in the theater back in the day (as did, apparently, a bunch of future Star Trek franchise writers). It’s a very minor guilty pleasure for me and is certainly watchable but the Flash Gordon era miniatures and crude effects really drag it down, especially after having seen the discarded miniatures in the then current issue of the late, great, Cinefex that showed how the original director was going for a more hard science fiction take. I’d watch it again on a rainy day.
I saw and liked this movie when it came out, particularly admiring Gossett’s performance under all that makeup. I always liked Dennis Quaid’s ability to play jerks who learn. I also enjoyed Blade Runner when it came out, long before many people came around to it. An SFF reader since my childhood, I welcomed the chance to see SFF movies.
I broadly agree with your review of this film – it’s a rather touching and effective piece of character work that occasionally dips into spectacle – though I find your blanket characterisation of STAR WARS fans to be in poor taste, not to mention a very poor look given that a key part of your appreciation for the film under discussion is it’s breaking-down of bigotry based on unexamined prejudices.
It also seems fair to point out that Willis Davidge’s prejudice against Jeriba Shigan and his species isn’t entirely grounded in mere ignorance: if a nation or people shoot at you for long enough, you learn to dislike them quite acutely no matter their actual personal qualities (Especially when you see comrades killed in front of you).
Of course the same goes for Jeriba Shigan and his people r.e. Humanity (It occurs to me that a sequel to this film might do well to dig into the challenges of reconstruction after the war is done – especially if the political situation is such that while the ‘Drac’ polity and the BTA are at peace, there’s plenty of room for local bloodshed when personal grudges boil over into gunfights – with a film or a show following a mixed team of peacekeepers as they work to avoid further bloodshed and learn better from some thoroughly nasty experiences).
I’m not entirely sure what point is being made about Star Wars in the article. There’s the claim that the movie found its 1985 audience in Star Wars fans, so if that was the case, wouldn’t it have done better box office?
Whoops, please replace “his” with “they” when it comes to Jeriba Shigan and their species: I kept thinking of the late Mr Louis Gosset and not the character (My apologies).
Didn’t the film use it/its pronouns for the Drac?
The film did not flop because it was ahead of its time, it flopped because of the disappointing and boring parts. Maybe even because it was too anxious to really go all in with the sexuality. Everybody was anticipating the film, this was the era of Boy George, Cat People etc. Petersepn was famous. It was very much of its time.
If you believe that it was ahead of its time it’s because nowadays everything is sliding backwards.
Also Star Wars fans back then were diverse and not as bonkers as today. It was not an “anti woke” fandom and many people enjoyed both Star Wars and Star Trek.
The world is just a lot worse than it was back then.
Good point — people tend to assume cultural progress is linear, but it’s more cyclical. There was a fair amount of transgender advocacy and awareness in the 1980s-90s. It’s not a new issue; it’s just that efforts to improve awareness or inclusion tend to peter out eventually as inertia and conservative pushback take hold, reversing former gains, so the process of pushing for change has to start over again.
Enemy Mine is why I tracked down a copy of the Super Hugos anthology. (I had borrowed that anthology from the library ages earlier and remembered ‘there was a book with both Bicentennial Man and Enemy Mine in it’).
I admit, I’m a little leery of the movie reading this description, not because I necessarily think it would be a bad movie, but because I really feel that the attitude that the movie has towards the story, while true to the original story, isn’t one I would enjoy as much. But that may be me reading to much into this.
Thanks for the wonderful essay. I remember reading “Enemy Mine” in Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine when it came out and was blown away by it. When the movie came out, we could only afford to see one movie a year and so it was our choice that year. It remains on my lifetime favorites list.
I freaking LOVED this movie, and am so glad it’s having a moment here. I was 10 or 11 and stumbled on it at a friend’s parents’ house at the end of the 80s (no idea if on VHS or on cable, as they had both) and it blew me away. I still tear up thinking about the lineage recitals at the end, golly. Later as an adult I often wondered if I’d dreamed it, because it seemed a universe away from other sci-fi during that decade. Beautiful tribute, thank you!
I’ve loved this movie for a long, long time, and still think it deserves more love. Lou Gossett Jr.’s performance as Jeriba is hands down one of my favourites ever.
It’s been a favorite of mine, and this a great write up. I’m overdue for a rewatch… Thanks for this!
Ah. I still remember it from good ol’ USSR. We had a habit of going to the cinema after school, watching things like Robocop and Enemy Mine. Perestroika was an interesting time for sure, where you still have Communism as the goal yet here’s all the Western stuff seeping in and some fledgling commerce starting.