Review of Enemy Mine (1985) by Senor C — 30 Aug 2009

There seems to be lots of continuing talk about the originality of District 9 and how it uses the aliens as a springboard into an allegory on racism. And it's not that I didn't like District 9, I just thought the racism allegory was just a copy of what I remembered from Enemy Mine. So when I was looking for a movie to watch over dinner one evening last week while my wife was off at work, and I found Enemy Mine on Netflix Instant view, I figured I might as well refresh my memory.

And upon this most recent viewing, I've found that Enemy Mine really has not aged very well at all. The effects are horribly chintzy, in a way reminiscent of the Buck Rogers TV show with Gil Gerard. But more than that, the writing is quite melodramatic. The movie works very well conceptually, however, and it is still a powerful allegorical tool to establish racism against an alien race that is wholly and completely different than humans, and it does challenge your ideals of decency.

But the one thing that the movie succeeds or fails on the most is Dennis Quaid. A pretty effective measure of how good the movie is comes from the question of how good you think Dennis Quaid is in the film. The rest of the movie pretty much follows is performance. He's a bit melodramatic, so the rest of the film is a bit melodramatic. He's very committed to the seriousness of the allegory, so the rest of the film is so committed. The movie's most refreshing parts remain the sequences between Quaid and the alien child that he raises. It does work in a very sweetly affectionate surrogate father-son relationship.

But it's all a bit clumsy, and because of movies like District 9 and Alien Nation, the concept of Enemy Mine has lost a lot of its freshness. So what remains is an intriguing concept, but a product that feels horribly dated. Worth a look for sci-fi fans, though. And still, admirable as a mainstream attempt at sci fi which was less about effects and monsters as it was about relationships.