Monsters & Mullets: Enemy Mine (1985)

Enemy Mine features a voice-over. Two voice-overs, in fact; the bulk of the film is narrated by the main character, and then the epilogue by someone else. Anyone who’s ever read much in the way of film criticism will probably have the same reaction to the idea of a voice-over that I did: knee-jerk dismissal. Voice-overs are lazy, I’ve been taught, only used if the film doesn’t make sense or if someone involved in the production doesn’t trust the audience to understand what’s happening.  Harvey Weinstein was a huge proponent of them, infamously buying the distribution rights to independent films and then hacking them into bits and adding voice-overs to make them more mainstream.

While working on the essay below I went looking for a link to that story about Weinstein, and found one.  Tony Rayns, a critic with the BFI, had some ferocious opinions about what Weinstein was going to do to Snowpiercer, and why:

https://www.if.com.au/Harvey-Scissorhands-strikes-again/

Leaving aside that ‘it seems to say the least anomalous’ doesn’t make any sense, let’s unpack this! Weinstein picked up the distribution rights to a South Korean/Czech dystopian science fiction film about an uprising on a speeding train. Despite the fact that 80% of the film is in English, Weinstein asked for 20 minutes to be edited down and a voice-over to be added in order to bring the film to the US market. This, of course, outraged film purists like the guy quoted above, who decided to blame not just Weinstein, but, you know, those dummies out there in the American heartland who just aren’t smart enough to appreciate Captain American punching Tilda Swinton on a train, and who therefore make movies worse for the rest of us.

Here’s the thing. Snowpiercer cost forty million dollars to make, and the people who stumped up that money didn’t do so out of the goodness of their hearts. They did it to get their investment back, ideally with a lot more money on top of that. Y’know how films make money? From people seeing them in cinemas. And that usually means that some compromise between the vision of the creative team and the requirements of the mass market will be necessary.  Not because 250 million Americans are too stupid to understand dystopic face-punching. (Quick reminder that the Hunger Games films made approximately one and a half billion dollars in North America alone, and they’re a load of dystopic face-punching starring, ew, a girl.)

The point is: Weinstein – about whom I feel gross devoting even a few paragraphs – absolutely underestimated the taste and intelligence of his audience and it is absolutely reasonable to ding him for that.  But so does this critic, who gleefully dismisses the supposed taste of nearly a quarter of an entire country based on their location and supposed intelligence and education.

Not to belabor the point further, but Oklahoma is in the South. Also, no one has called it the ‘mid-west’ in fifty years. Drop the hyphen and add a capital letter, copy-editor.

And you know what? Snowpiercer is too long. It’s almost like sometimes directors get so caught up in their vision that they get a little self-indulgent.

What does all this have to do with Enemy Mine? Enemy Mine relies heavily on a voice-over. And it doesn’t need to. The voice-over adds so little to the film beyond a bit of early world-building that it should absolutely have been scrapped. Why it exists I don’t want to speculate; the fact is that it does, and it unfortunately drags the film down with it. The pacing problems that dog the film’s hour-and-forty-nine-minute runtime could actually be dealt with in part by having the characters discuss the information that is instead conveyed, up front, in one of the movie’s many, many VOs. Show don’t tell is and remains valid advice. Who knew?

Let’s get to it.

We open with a painted backdrop and spinning planets and, hey, it turns out that this was the second English-language film by Wolfgang Peterson. You know, of Das Boot and The Neverending Story. Well, for better or for worse, Enemy Mine looks really old fashioned, despite a $40 million budget and everyone’s best efforts. The title type borrows heavily from The Thing, which I would not be surprised to learn was the art direction.

What do we learn from the first voice over? The humans have ended war on earth and now have spread across the solar system, only to find themselves engaged in endless confrontation with the alien race the Dracs. The Dracs have claimed ‘squatters’ rights’ to some mineral-rich planets, and the humans are trying to turf them out. DO YOU THINK THE DRACS MIGHT HAVE A DIFFERENT INTERPRETATION OF THIS CONFLICT. DO YOU THINK WE MIGHT LEARN THAT ALONGSIDE THE HUMAN CHARACTER AT SOME POINT IN THIS FILM. The VO continues, telling us that Dracs are ‘completely inhuman, not even male or female.’ Is that a first-act asexual reproduction gun I see hanging on the wall over there?

Here’s what you need to know. Dennis Quaid plays Willis, a REAL SHOUTY PILOT, who gets into a dogfight with a Drac. Both crash-land on a barren planet that… well, it looks like a big soundstage. They tried… but they failed. Willis tracks down the Drac, who captures him pretty easily and gets REAL SHOUTY for a long time, to which the Drac responds with much more patience and gentleness than Willis deserves. The Drac is named Jeriba and is played by Lou Gossett Jr, who outclasses the shit out of Quaid.

There are two other forms of life on this planet, and they’re surprisingly important. One is a completely adorable half-trilobite half-turtle that makes little magpie-esque gurgles. The other is, uh, a sarlacc. No, really; it lives in a pit and burps after it eats turtlebites. Please stop with the burping murderpits, scifi movies. These two creatures are important because Willis is constantly falling into sarlaac pits and getting rescued, and also they eat and build shelters out of the turtlebites.

Look, this is a long film, nearly 2 hours, and hits all the expected science fictional beats. Willis and Jeriba yell at each other, eventually become roommate-frenemies, then friends. Then Jeriba – whom Willis only ever calls Jerry, like, we get it, film -- gets pregnant and dies. But not before exacting a promise from Willis that he’ll take the baby back to the Drac homeworld and teach it its lineage.

Willis raises the baby, Zammis, who is later captured by human slavers. Willis is shot by the slavers and left for dead. Usefully, however, his body is discovered by his former shipmates and taken back to his space station. Before he can be cremated and shot into space, he wakes, is healed, steals a ship and goes back to the planet to save Zammis. There’s a too-long fight sequence, but Zammis is saved and Willis takes him to the homeworld of his forefathers. In the nicest moment of the film, we learn that the child adds Willis’ name to the list of Zammis’ ancestors, which goes back hundreds of generations. That’s… it. That’s what happens. Why is this film nearly two hours long?

The primary problem with the film is that it has very, very little energy. Willis and Jeriba are stuck on the planet for years, and then Willis and his child for more years, and there’s simply not enough conflict to make what’s essentially a movie-length bottle episode about two people we don’t care about work. This despite the fact that Willis spends the first half of the film being an absolute asshole and manufacturing conflict with literally every other living creature on the planet (remember, there are two). Quaid, as mentioned above, plays his character as REAL, REAL SHOUTY. There’s nothing remotely approaching nuance to his acting; he’s playing an asshole bigot and he does so BY SHOUTING. When he can’t communicate with Jeriba because, you know, they speak different languages, he SHOUTS because he is an UGLY AMERICAN WHAT SHOUTS AT ICKY FOREIGNERS. ‘Don’t you speak EENGLEEESH’ he yells early on at Jeriba, an alien life-form, in perhaps the film’s least nuanced scene. (Which is saying a lot.)

When Willis finally gets over himself and makes friends with Jeriba, the two actors are better able to sell the movie. Dennis Quaid, kind of the poor man’s answer to Harrison Ford, is known for his likability; he doesn’t quite have the chops to make Willis the Asshole work, so the film picks up a bit once he’s done being horrible. But a lot of the film is Willis being deeply, deeply unpleasant in the face of Jeriba’s patience and gentleness. Which yes, is the point! But it’s also a massively clichéd trope, and boring to watch. We get it. He’s ‘a human’ aka an American, he’s grossly ignorant and intolerant and prejudiced, and for some reason he’s our hero and we’re supposed to want to go on this journey of self-discovery with him.

The film’s major claim to fame, and the detail people tend to remember about it, is Jeriba’s pregnancy. The Dracs reproduce asexually, and, well, Jeriba is expecting. Also, continuing the long and tedious tradition of books, film, tv and basically every form of storytelling everywhere, Jeriba dies in childbirth. Would it have a more subversive and significantly less clichéd message if Jeriba had lived through Zammis’ birth? Would this film be stronger if we’d had scenes of Willis and Jeriba raising Zammis together? Who knows, but it’s an interesting thought experiment.

Another interesting thought-experiment: the strength of this film’s allegorical message about race relations. If, indeed, that’s what it is. It could just be a film about how Americans are mean to Germans, given Wolfgang Peterson’s nationality and the fact that Willis calls Jeriba ‘Jerry.’ Let’s give the film the benefit of the doubt and work with the more interesting metaphor.

On the one hand, there’s an argument to be made that the Dracs represent people of colour; they’re willfully misunderstood by a militaristic white society bent on land-grabbing, as represented by an ignorant and horrifically antagonistic white (American) man (Willis). Willis refuses to understand Dracs society as anything other than backwards, gross, weird and completely ‘inhuman’ until forced by location and circumstance to confront his own prejudices and slowly, slowly learn that, sigh, everything he’s ever been told about the Dracs is a lie. Also, while the military arm of the human race is bent on destroying the Dracs, there’re also the human slavers, who use captured Dracs to mine whatever mineral it is that everyone in this galaxy cares about. Importantly, Jeriba and Zammis are played by actors of colour, which gives the theory credence.

On the other hand, there are at least two actors of colour playing humans – a female pilot at the film’s start, and a black slaver at the film’s end. We could argue that the film is actually trying to make a point about how white people treat people of colour, and to shade that point with a little nuance by adding actors of colour to the human side of the equation. But, cynically, I suspect that an exploration of Uncle Tom syndrome – no matter how minor - is a little outside the remit of Enemy Mine. It certainly isn’t done particularly well, if it is done intentionally.

African-American Lou Gossett Jr is a phenomenally talented, award-winning (including an Oscar) actor, so is casting him in the role of Jeriba a huge get for the film? Or, because he spends his time on screen covered in prosthetics (as does Bumper Robinson, also Black, who plays Zammis) is he simply another example of Hollywood’s erasure of actors of colour in mainstream films? (See, eg, Zoe Saldana as the green-skinned Gamora, or Disney’s Tiana, their first and only African-American princess, who spends ¾ of her film as a frog.)

My suspicion, which I’ve been able to find no support for whatsoever, is that the filmmakers did want to use the movie to explore race relations, at least to a degree. But the result is unfortunately superficial and the message muddled. Whatever the filmmakers’ intentions, however, the reason we haven’t spent the last 30 years arguing about the film’s meaning is because the movie itself is such an exhausting slog. If you poke about on the internet you’ll occasionally run across someone suggesting that Enemy Mine is a ‘lost SF classic’ – but, frankly, it isn’t. It flopped in cinemas because, ultimately, it’s neither fun enough nor meaty enough to reward rewatching and discussion. I watched it twice in 24 hours and have spent three weeks hammering away at this review because, ultimately, there simply ain’t much there there.

The first draft of this essay was mean. I pulled the film apart for being boring and predictable, for committing sins like its unnecessary reliance on a voice-over. And, while looking for something I could link to in order to bolster my argument about voice-overs, I ran into the interview with Tony Rayns quoted at the top, and realized that I was painting with strokes as broad as he, and being as unfairly dismissive of cinema audiences (if not in such an obviously shitty way as calling movie-goers ‘hicks’). I’ve spent my entire life reading science fiction, so yes, the story that Enemy Mine is telling is boring to me. But the vast majority of the audience for this film – a mainstream, commercial film by a famous director and starring big-name actors – doesn’t have my background and my knowledge. That doesn’t mean that they’re less intelligent, less educated, or less sophisticated than I. They simply bring different knowledge and different expectations to film than I do.

So when I sat down to rework the essay I tried to set my own prejudices aside and tackle the film on its own merits – which I should have been doing in the first place.  Enemy Mine is not a great film; it’s too long, it has very little energy, Dennis Quaid doesn’t have a solid handle on his character, and whatever thematic points it’s trying to make about race – if any – are incoherent at best. But it is not without ambition, and it does feature a twist that makes it stand out amongst a crowded field of post-Star Wars SF films from the 1980s. Its long, airless stretches and mediocre acting make it tough for me to recommend to potential viewers who don’t know much about SF, and its problematic messaging and predictability make it hard for me to recommend it to SF fans as anything other than an interesting effort. But it is absolutely not my right to suggest anything about anyone who does love this film, especially not for the sake of a cheap joke.

The entire reason I started Monsters & Mullets, lo these many years ago, was to bring a critical eye to deeply problematic films that I nevertheless love passionately. Humour is an easy way in, and being mean can be very funny. But mean humour at an audience’s expense is beneath anyone who pretends any sort of critical approach to art, to literature, to film, to television, or to human endeavour full-stop.

We return to 80s fantasy next week with one of my life-long favourites, Ladyhawke.

Monsters: Obviously THE REAL MONSTER IS A SHOUTY AMERICAN MAN and hey, also some slavers?, but for our purposes, the monsters are the Dracs. And the turtlebites and the sarlacc pit. The prosthetics are good and even if they weren’t, I will always rate a practical effect over motion capture because I’m an old-school nerd who loves practical effects. Lou Gosset Jr does his best to make Jeriba move not like a person, but it’s still just very stagey ‘move more sinuously!’ that we’ve seen in a hundred films with non-human characters played by humans, all affected head-tilts and exaggerated movements. Bumper Robinson, who plays the child Zammis, also does his best… but it seems there’s only so much one can do, physically, to come across less human in one’s performance.

Mullets: Quaid’s Willis grows a proper shrub of Robinson Crusoe hair, head and facial, but otherwise there’s not much to point out in the hair department. There are, however, Villainous Piercings, as the two slaver brothers who shoot Willis and kidnap Zammis both have pierced ears.

Hookers, Victims and Doormats: So, among the other problems this film has, it also hates women. As in, there are two female character and they doesn’t even have lines? One of them does cast concerned looks, though. LADIES AND THEIR FEELINGS, AM I RIGHT. And when Willis tries to reassure Jeriba that women worry about giving birth all the time, Jeriba responds with ‘I am not a woman!’ – with an inflection that reads not as ‘I’m a hermaphrodite, you asshole’ but instead as a ‘I’m not a stinky girl.’ And then there’s the whole ‘white balloon’ thing – Willis’ copilot at the film’s beginning dies before going on a date with a woman whose nickname is, apparently, ‘The White Balloon.’  When Willis teases him about going on a date with, ew, a not-super-skinny woman, he defends her… thusly: ‘C’mon, she’s lost twenty pounds.’ Jesus.

Remake watch: There does not appear to be a remake on the horizon, which to be honest, is a shame. With modern special effects and a more thoughtful approach to the meaning which can be mined from the material, there’s rich potential in the idea of in a modern remake of Enemy Mine. 

If you’ve received this email because you’re a subscriber, thank you! If you found it on the Substack website or heard about it from someone else, hello! Tell me about your favourite monsters on Twitter @thefingersofgod.