Enemy Mine: The Two-Soldier Alien Truce

Enemy Mine is one of the great commercial catastrophes of eighties science fiction, and the story of how it got made is more famous than the film itself — which is a shame, because buried under the wreckage is a picture that tried something almost nobody else was trying in 1985. It asked an audience raised on the alien as vermin to sit in a cave for two hours with one, and to like him.

It did not work. Fox spent somewhere in the region of forty million dollars and got back a fraction of it. But the reason it failed has very little to do with the reason it is worth your evening.

The premise, kept clean

Humanity and the Dracs are at war over the Fyrine system. Willis Davidge (Dennis Quaid) is a hotshot fighter pilot with a straightforward attitude to the enemy — kill them, ideally in numbers — and in a dogfight he and a Drac pilot shoot each other down onto the same uninhabited rock, Fyrine IV. The Drac is Jeriba Shigan (Louis Gossett Jr.), and the planet is a poisonous, storm-lashed volcanic waste that wants both of them dead considerably more than they want each other dead.

So they try to murder one another for a while, fail, and then get on with the business of not dying. Language comes first, grudgingly. Then shelter, then food, then — because there is nothing else to do on a rock at the end of the universe — conversation. Jerry, as Davidge inevitably calls him, has a holy book called the Talman and a lineage he can recite back generations. Davidge has a scar and a grudge. The film is about what happens when those two things are left alone together long enough.

Barry Longyear’s source novella won both the Hugo and the Nebula, and its central move is the one the film keeps: the alien is not a metaphor you decode, he is a person you slowly stop mistranslating.

The production that nearly ate it

The behind-the-camera story matters here, because it explains the film’s shape. Shooting began in Iceland under a different director, Richard Loncraine, whose vision for the material was evidently not Fox’s; he was removed early. Wolfgang Petersen — coming off Das Boot and The NeverEnding Story, and therefore a man with a proven gift for confined spaces and for children’s stories about loyalty — took over, scrapped a great deal, and moved the production onto soundstages in Munich, where an entire alien planet was built indoors.

You can see the seam. The film’s exteriors are magnificent studio artifice — black glass rock, sulphur light, wind machines, a sky like a bruise — and they have the airless, total quality of a world made by hand in a shed. Petersen shot Das Boot inside a submarine mock-up and learned there that a fake enclosure photographed with conviction becomes more oppressive than a real location, because the camera can never escape it. Fyrine IV is that lesson applied to a whole planet. It is stagey, and the staginess is load-bearing: two men in a box, no exit, the walls painted with weather.

The cost of the reshoot was that the picture arrived expensive and late into a marketplace with no idea what to do with it. It is a war film with two characters and no war, a prestige effects picture with nothing to put on a poster, and a story about tenderness between enemies released the year before Cameron taught the decade to shoot aliens for sport. Fox had bought one film and been handed another.

Acting with your face taken away

Here is the craft section, and it is the reason to watch.

Chris Walas — a year out from the makeup work that would define Cronenberg’s love story told in meat — built the Drac as a full-head prosthetic: a smooth, reptilian, faintly amphibian skull with a fixed mouth, no visible ears, no eyebrows, and skin that does not crease the way skin creases. It is a good design precisely because it refuses the usual cheat of leaving the actor’s eyes and mouth in open air to do the emoting.

Which means Louis Gossett Jr., three years after his Oscar for An Officer and a Gentleman, is acting with almost every instrument he owns confiscated. No micro-expression survives the latex. No smile reads. What he has left is voice, posture, and the tilt of a head — and what he does with them is the best performance in any film of this kind that decade. Gossett builds Jerry out of rhythm: a formal, slightly archaic cadence for the Talman and the lineage, a drier and faster register for arguing with Davidge, and a physical stillness that makes the character read as older and more serious than the man opposite him. When Jerry is amused, you know, and you could not point to the frame that told you.

That is the whole argument for prosthetic performance as a discipline rather than a handicap. Gossett is not fighting the makeup. He is playing a person for whom that face is normal, which is a much harder and much rarer thing than it sounds, and it is why the film’s central relationship earns a warmth that the script alone would not have bought. Maurice Jarre’s score helps, staying stubbornly humane and orchestral over the sulphur, refusing the synthesised alienness the images invite.

What it is really descended from

The collector’s note is not a science-fiction film at all. Enemy Mine is a straight remount of John Boorman’s Hell in the Pacific (1968), in which Lee Marvin and Toshirō Mifune, an American pilot and a Japanese naval officer, wash up on the same empty island in the Second World War and spend the picture moving from mutual murder through grudging cooperation into something neither can name. Boorman — whose fractured, cold intelligence the desk has picked over in Point Blank — shot it with almost no dialogue and famously refused his characters a reconciliation the audience could take home.

That refusal is the difference. Boorman’s film ends in unresolved wreckage. Enemy Mine grants its two soldiers a great deal of what Boorman withheld, and the question of how much it should have granted is the one the film leaves you with. Whether that is the film’s courage or its compromise is the honest question at its centre, and I go back and forth. What is beyond argument is the descent. Change the sulphur back to sand and the latex back to a uniform, and Petersen has made Boorman’s film with a happy ending.

Behind both sits Robinson Crusoe, and the film knows it — the tutoring, the naming, the imposition of one culture’s grammar onto another’s mouth. That the eighties could only stage this encounter by putting a Black actor inside a rubber head and a white actor’s face in open air is a fact the film never examines and later cinema had to. District 9 is downstream of Enemy Mine in premise and considerably sharper about exactly this.

The case against

Quaid is the problem. He is playing the audience surrogate and he plays it at one volume — jaw set, eyes narrowed, a man doing an impression of a man being changed. Opposite Gossett’s precision it registers as coarse, and the film’s first half-hour of mutual hostility is the weakest stretch because it depends on him.

The third act is the other problem. Having built a chamber piece of real delicacy, the film panics and imports a plot: villains, an installation, a rescue, gunfire. Brion James turns up to be menacing at speed. The volume rises, the intimacy evaporates, and Petersen — a director who is at his best when nobody can leave the room — is suddenly staging an action climax he clearly has no appetite for. The film’s last twenty minutes belong to a different, worse picture, and you can feel the studio’s fingerprints on every frame.

Where it stands

It stands as an honourable ruin, and honourable ruins are the most rewarding thing on this desk. Watch it for Gossett, who does more with a fixed rubber mouth than most stars manage with a whole face. Watch it for a hand-built planet that a modern budget would render into weightless nothing. Watch it because a mainstream studio in 1985 spent enormous money on the proposition that the enemy has a mother, a book and a name — and lost that money, spectacularly, which tells you something about the decade that the hits do not.

It turns up on disc and drifts through the streaming services; any transfer that respects the black levels will do, as most of the film is lit by firelight.

Spoilers below

The turn is Jerry’s pregnancy. Dracs are single-gendered and reproduce alone, and Jeriba Shigan has been carrying a child for most of the film without Davidge understanding what he has been looking at. The birth kills him. Davidge — the pilot who opened the picture cheerfully killing this species — delivers his enemy’s baby, buries his friend, and raises the child in the cave, teaching it English and the Jeriba lineage in the same breath.

Zammis is the film’s real subject and the reason its sentimentality is load-bearing rather than decorative. Davidge does not adopt an alien child as an act of tolerance. He does it because there is nobody else, and the film is honest about how much of moral progress is simply proximity and no alternative. The lineage recitation — Jerry drilling generations of names into Davidge, Davidge drilling them into Zammis — is the mechanism: a species’ continuity handed to the man who was sent to end it, and carried by him out of duty before he ever feels affection.

Then the scavengers arrive: humans strip-mining Fyrine IV with Drac slave labour, who take Zammis and leave Davidge for dead. That the film’s monsters are our own people is the only genuinely unsentimental move in the last act, and it is over quickly.

The ending goes to Dracon, where Davidge stands before the Holy Council and recites the Jeriba line — every ancestor, in order, in their language — to enter Zammis into the record as Jerry’s heir. It is unabashed, and it works on me every time, because Gossett spent an hour and a half establishing that this recitation is the most serious thing a Drac can do. The film’s argument arrives in its last minute: Davidge has not learned to tolerate the Dracs. He has become one of their fathers, which is a claim about assimilation that the film makes joyfully and never once interrogates. Boorman would have cut it. I am glad Petersen did not, and I understand entirely why the seriousness of Hell in the Pacific is the thing everyone remembers and this is the thing nobody saw.