Wolfgang Petersen

(Second Viewing, October 2021) I’m not sure I can plausibly claim to have seen Enemy Mine before—it’s familiar enough (even if I discount having read Barry Longyear’s original short story) that I must have seen at least bits and pieces of it in the early 1990s, but most of the film felt new enough. What’s perhaps most remarkable about it (and can be traced back straight to its literary origin) is how much of the film plays as an intimate drama between sworn enemy warriors (a human and an alien) stuck together on an inhospitable planet, learning to trust each other and eventually having one care for the child of the other. That’s unusually mature material for 1980s Science Fiction films, and despite this leading to a deliberately slow-paced film, it does present something that hasn’t often been attempted in the framework of a military SF film. Having director Wolfgang Petersen does much to ground the film in realism despite now-quaint special effects (although used more effectively than many films of the time). Of course, this admiration has its limits: Enemy Mine’s third act is an abrupt return to familiar bellicose clichés, tried formula and sappy moments. Most sources are clear on this being due to studio interference—never quite trusting the audience to be satisfied by maturity, they had to go for a conventional conclusion. I’m not going to argue that Enemy Mine is a great movie even if you lop off the third act: the dialogue can be blunt to the point of embarrassment, and the production values now feel too creaky to be enjoyed as nothing but an approximation of realism. But, even with the slow pacing taken into account, Enemy Mine does try, at least for an hour or so, to do something unusual for the time and still too rare today. It’s an admirable paean to peace and understanding between different races, and a somewhat atypical SF film even now. At least if you lop off that last act.