During a war between humans and the alien Drac, two pilots, human Willis Davidge (Dennis Quaid) and Drac Jeriba ‘Jerry’ Shigan (Louis Gossett Jr.) crash on a barren world. The two enemies must work together to survive.
An embarrassment to science fiction, Enemy Mine starts as an after school special, switches to a weepy, and ends up as an incoherent action film. The first half of Enemy Mine is moving, interesting, and carries an important message, as long as you are five. For anyone older, this is pabulum. OK, it’s pabulum for everyone, but pabulum may be a good choice for a young child.
It starts with Quaid performing Davidge as Rock Rightman, Space Cowboy. With wide eyes and woops, he fights for the American (make that human) way. Then he crashes his plastic ship on the papier-mâché rocks. The Buck Rogers retro look could be charming in a light homage to early sci-fi serials; here it just looks fake. Once on the planet, Quaid shouts for the next thirty minutes. Now that’s character development! On the other hand, Gossett Jr. plays the alien Drac by wearing a rubber mask and gargling. Keep in mind, this is the high concept part of the film. You see, here is a meeting between a human and something completely different, a life form unlike our own, evolved on a different world, with a strange culture we couldn’t hope to understand. Delving deep into science fiction, the filmmakers managed a guy in a mask. Davidge and Jerry don’t end up overcoming their differences; instead, they find out that they don’t have any. Of course actually making the alien be…alien might confuse the young’ens that the film is force feeding its message to. In case you missed it, the message is “people of different races can get along.” Gosh. Next week we will learn about cleaning our room.
Ah, but then the film changes course because we find out that Jerry is pregnant (that’s the big difference between his species and ours—they only have one gender). Yes, we get to see Louis Gossett Jr. with the I’m-with-child glow that ’40s films loved so. Sentimentality washes over everything as the man with the funny mask and the smug unshaven guy make gleeful plans for the blessed event. Forget science fiction. Forget a child’s morality play. Once Jerry is showing, Enemy Mine becomes the kind of “women’s picture” that they stopped making fifty years ago. As those were all tear-jerking melodramas, do I have to tell you what will happen?
Which brings me to the end (yes, I’m pretty deep in spoilers now, but think of this as a service to all of you who make the wise decision never to see this picture). Because someone (I’ve been told it was the studio) realized that nothing had happened for 90 minutes, suddenly, things happen. They make no sense, but they do happen. First, Davidge is shot dead. Dead. Not kind’a dead, or mostly dead. Not only does a bullet take him out, but he lays there for hours or days until his body is picked up, and determined to be a corpse. Then more time passes until he ends up on a funeral conveyor belt, and just as he’s going to be dumped into space, he wakes up. What miracle is this? Some secret Drac technology he got from Jerry? Nope, he just wakes up. And that horse in the Godfather, it’s OK too.
His superiors think he might be a traitor, but they decide to let him roam around and have access to weapons and ships. So off he goes to fight some evil human miners who use Dracs as slaves. Luckily, Davidge is going after the worst slave operation in all of space. They have no security and nothing confining the Dracs except the slavers waving their fists. Why haven’t the Dracs rioted and killed all these morons? I guess they were waiting for Cowboy Davidge. I won’t give away the exciting battle, but I do want to comment on the arrival of his friends. About ten minutes after he sets down, his two buddies show up in their government owned fighter rocket. Ummmm. Did the government forget they were at war with the Drac? Or did these two spacemen swipe their ship as well (in which case government installations of the future need a lot of help).
Be it the ludicrous plot, the insipid pregnancy, the simplistic theme, the hackneyed dialog, or the ’50s TV show sets, there’s something for everyone to hate.