ENEMY MINE (1985)

Directed by Wolfgang Petersen, Starring: Dennis Quaid, Louis Gosset Jr, Brion James. Sci-Fi, 1985, Cert 12.

“Earthman, your Mickey Mouse is one big stupid dope!”

Following on from his magical telling of Michael Ende’s THE NEVERENDING STORY (1984), German director Wolfgang Petersen was then brought on board to take over Twentieth Century Fox’s floundering adaptation of Barry B. Longyear’s sci-fi novella ENEMY MINE. Relocating the production to the Bavaria Studios in Munich, Petersen also swapped the previously problematic Icelandic location shoot for the more temperate climes of Lanzarote. The end result was a beautifully designed, touching sci-fi parable, which failed abysmally at the box-office, but is richly deserving of re-evaluation and invitingly possible thanks to this HD presentation.

The story is a well-trodden one. Two enemies are stranded together in a hostile environment, but in order for them to survive they eventually have to overcome their differences and work together. In ENEMY MINE, we have a 21^st century intergalactic human space coloniser Willis Davidge (Dennis Quaid) crash-landing on an inhospitable planet called Fyrine IV after an unsuccessful space-ship dogfight with an alien enemy craft piloted by a ‘Drac’ warrior from the planet Dracon (Louis Gosset Jr.). 

Luckily, the atmosphere is breathable to both races (convenient otherwise it’d be a much shorter film), although there are some terribly inconvenient meteor-storms and some decidedly unfriendly fauna in the shape of Chris Walas’ creature effects. 

The combination of lunar-like location work in the volcanic Canary Island of Lanzarote together with the artwork and Bavaria studio sets are majestically rendered in a lush widescreen canvas. Thankfully these alien vistas can be fully appreciated on this rich HD transfer (I dread to think how anaemic they must’ve appeared back on 80’s pan and scan VHS).

But here also lies the film’s contradiction. Whilst we’ve given this spectacular sci-fi backdrop, and an opening space battle courtesy of Industrial Light and Magic, the tale which then unfolds is an intimate two-hander character piece, largely without grandiose special effects (apart from Louis Gosset Jr.’s intricately pulsing reptilian make-up), and I can see why it proved a hard-sell to the studio at the time of release, and a subsequent box-office flop.

Both Quaid and Gosset Jr. are terrific in their respective roles as their character arcs range from deathly hostility to grudging co-dependency and further... It seems ridiculous to tip-toe around a film made over 30 years ago for fear of dropping a spoiler bomb, but, just as I came to view this film for the first time via this disc, I’m conscious that perhaps at least one person reading this might have somehow managed to avoid a complete plot download prior to viewing, so I’ll just leave it there. I will say however that there’s an actual mining facility revealed in the film’s jarring final third, which seems overly literal and tacked on – rumours suggest studio insistence on adding this element otherwise the audience would’ve felt cheated by the film’s title (what?) If this is the case then director Petersen must surely feel fortunate that the US distributor of his German U-boat drama DAS BOOT didn’t insist on wedging in a sub-plot about a piece of military footwear! 

ENEMY MINE is a film you have to meet half-way in order to get the most out of it. It’s undeniably richly rewarding visually, but also humorous and surprisingly moving (if you give it a chance to be). Swimming against the Regan Era Cold-War current in the mid 80’s, its message ran counter to the overriding political rhetoric of the time, and perhaps that, combined with a botched publicity campaign, contributed to it sinking largely without a trace at the box-office. I missed out on ENEMY MINE when it came out both initially at the cinema and then subsequently on home-video, but thanks to this excellent HD presentation, it’s a lot easier to meet the film half-way, and I’m very glad I (finally) did. 

 

**** (out of 5*)

Paul Worts