Dennis Quaid’s Underrated Sci-Fi Flick Perfectly Captured An Immortal Trope
Why Enemy Mine endures.
What happens when two combatants of a massive conflict are isolated from their reasons for fighting each other? The idea that soldiers on opposite sides could find common ground because of an abrupt change of context is, by no means, a new idea. It wasn’t new in 1985, and it’s not new now. However, what the film Enemy Mine did was to bring this trope to science fiction in a way that was both startlingly new and paradoxically timeless.
Based on a 1979 novella of the same name by Barry B. Longyear, Enemy Mine remains, four decades later, a fantastically simple sci-fi film. Here’s why it’s still worth watching today.
As with the novella, Enemy Mine tells the story of Will Davidge (Dennis Quaid), a human starfighter pilot who crash-lands on a planet at the same time as one of his enemies, a member of the reptilian alien species known as the Dracs. This downed Drac is named Jeriba Shigan (Louis Gossett Jr.), later nicknamed “Jerry” by Davidge. The big twist in the movie comes fairly early, and that’s the fact that in Drac biology, a male like Jerry is the one to give birth to a child. So, Jerry is pregnant, and Davidge, eventually, helps deliver the child.
But, spoiler alert, Jerry perishes in childbirth, meaning that the human, Davidge, has to raise the Drac baby, named Zammis (Bumper Robinson). If this all sounds pretty ahead of its time, it very much is. Though just three years later, the movie version of Alien Nation would also feature an extraterrestrial in which the male of the species gets pregnant.
Dennis Quaid and Louis Gossett Jr. Enemy Mine.
And yet, the gender themes of Enemy Mine aren’t really what make the movie so tender and wonderful. The idea that Jerry is pregnant with an alien baby is just a given; it’s not a big deal. And, the notion that Davidge naturally wants to protect Zammis is thoroughly earned because the storytelling is, oddly enough, so naturalistic.
Directed by legendary filmmaker Wolfgang Petersen (his film, the NeverEnding Story, had just come out the year before), Enemy Mine had a strange production history, beginning its life as a movie initially helmed by Richard Loncraine. And due to management changes at 20th Century Fox, and some dissatisfaction with initial filming, Petersen was brought in to basically save the movie. Considering this fact, it’s a minor miracle that Enemy Mine is as good as it is, a sort of patchwork of not just one abandoned version of the film, but also an adaptation of an award-winning story. (The novella version of “Enemy Mine” won best novella at the 1980 Hugo Awards.)
Vincent Di Fate’s original artwork for the novella version of Barry B. Longyear’s “Enemy Mine” from 1979, along with a detail of the movie poster from 1985.
Something that Enemy Mine does so well, though, is to translate a fairly hardcore science fiction story into something that seems more approachable to a casual audience. In the novella, the illustrations make the Dracs seem much more reptilian, like walking lizards or dinosaurs. Visually, this makes the recent 2025 Strange New Worlds episode “Terrarium” a slightly more faithful version of the prose version of “Enemy Mine,” even if the plot is only superficially similar.
But, although various science fiction franchises — from Babylon 5 to Star Trek — have their version of this trope, Enemy Mine remains one of the best simply because the performances are so straightforward and heartfelt. For all the versions of this story that have existed, and will exist again in various science fiction worlds, Enemy Mine will also be the platonic ideal and a true classic.
