A long time ago, in 1968 (the year before I was born), there was a John Boorman movie starring Lee Marvin and Toshiro Mifune called "Hell in the Pacific." It was about an American and a Japanese soldier who find themselves stranded on the same island; the story follows the turbulent ups and downs of their relationship. Many years later, a movie with a similar-yet-different concept came out. It was called "Enemy Mine," and it starred Dennis Quaid as a human star pilot and Louis Gossett Jr. as an alien Drac pilot, both crash-landed on an inhospitable world and forced to learn to survive together.
The 1985 movie was a box-office bomb (as was "Hell in the Pacific"), but I saw it when I was a kid and deeply appreciated it. In retrospect, Wolfgang Petersen's "Enemy Mine" went even deeper into the whole relationship aspect because it explored the idea of the human and the Drac learning each other's languages and cultures, something that never happened in "Hell in the Pacific," which ends on a bleak note of incomprehension and nihilism.* "Enemy Mine" takes a tragic turn, but the movie continues even after the tragedy, becoming what turns out to be a story of redemption and interspecies healing. The movie, which has a good heart, really does deserve more credit than it ever got.
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*The ending I saw, in which both main characters are killed by a random bomb, was in fact an alternate ending. The original ending, which I never saw, had the two characters walking angrily away from each other after what may have been a misunderstanding.
Wow. I remember seeing that as a kid, too. I don't think I've seen it again since then, so I have very little memory of it.
ReplyDeleteI assume you're talking about "Enemy Mine."
DeleteYep.
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