Featured Essays Enemy Mine Enemy Mine Is the Queer, Anti-War Sci-Fi You’ve Been Missing ’90s Star Trek may have tackled issues of gender, race, and interstellar war — but Enemy Mine got there first.  By Meg Elison | Published on May 27, 2025 Credit: 20th Century Fox Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: 20th Century Fox In 1985, 20th Century Fox tried to convince audiences to go to the theater and see a tender story of connection between an all-American fighter pilot and a pregnant nonbinary enemy combatant by wrapping its loving heart in Homeric violence and space pew-pew dogfights.  It mostly did not work, and Enemy Mine has become an obscure science fiction film, remembered mostly for bombing at the box office. I come before you today to remind you of its lineage, the unlikelihood of its existence, and to put it in its rightful place among the great film adaptations of award-winning genre stories.  In 1979, Barry Longyear published the novella “Enemy Mine” in Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine. Longyear would republish and collect it, writing two more stories in the same universe, and winning the Nebula and Hugo awards for novella that year. The course of adaptation hardly ever runs smooth, and British director Richard Loncraine exited the production of the film adaptation early on, citing creative differences. The German Wolfgang Peterson (Neverending Story) took over, moving production from Budapest to Munich, and starting over with principal photography. Already deep in the red, this film was in trouble from the start.  Our heroes are also in trouble from the start: we open on a laser battle in space, with fighter pilots shooting energy weapons at one another while protagonist Willis Davidge (Dennis Quaid) and copilot Joey Wooster (Lance Kerwin) inform us (with the help of some clumsy narration) that Bilateral Terran Alliance (BTA) is at war with the Dracs over territory and resources, having grown tired of fighting over the same on Earth. The Dracs are a reptilian humanoid species, but Davidge has never seen one, he confesses as he kills several in combat. A barely-there Black woman pilot is killed, and Davidge reacts out of a need for vengeance by pursuing the ship responsible into the atmosphere of a nearby planet.  After crash-landing and finding his copilot dead, Davidge sets out to hunt down the Drac pilot, whom he saw eject. The two struggle for dominance, but are distracted from killing one another by a meteor shower and the local wildlife. With no other choice, they decide to get to know each other. Our Drac is Jeriba Shigan (Louis Gossett Jr.) but Davidge calls them Jerry. Jerry and Davidge are standoffish at first, insulting one another’s values and reenacting the interstellar war in miniature.  This middle part of the film is where all its lively heart beats, and where all its most difficult and rewarding work is done. We see Davidge become interested in Jerry’s theology and philosophy, which they read from a tiny book they wear on a necklace. Together, they read verses about refusing to answer violence with violence, about the benevolent nature of responding with love to those who hate you. Despite the extensive prosthetics and complex phonology Gosset is working with, the actor does a remarkable job of making Jerry relatable, likable, and sympathetic. Quaid, in turn, shows us the softening effect that any bigot undergoes when he is confronted with an individual rather than a monolith he’s encouraged to hate out of generalized bias. The two open to one another, while still struggling for survival and building a hut out of turtle shells.  The struggle is real as winter bears down on their planet, and as Davidge discovers that scavenger teams who enslave Dracs for labor have been visiting nearby. Driven apart by cabin fever, the pair are reunited by fear and necessity. Just when it seems it might be the two of them against the world until they both die, Jerry tells Davidge they’re pregnant.  Here, we have to engage with the film’s sexuality. Though early dialogue between Davidge and his BTA comrades constructs compulsory heterosexuality in workplace banter before the crash, Davidge makes no declaration or expression of his own. He leaves behind no wife and no girlfriend. His whole life gradually shifts from hope of rescue from this planet to building a life with Jerry. Announcing a pregnancy to the only other person around usually means that pregnancy was jointly created. Indeed, Davidge reacts with the expectant joy and incredulity of a new father. Though Davidge uses “it” as his pronoun to describe Jerry, the 1985 audience knew they were watching a performance between two men; Quaid and Gossett were established actors at the time. The result is the genesis of a queer family, any way we measure it. The two castaways have been intimate in sharing space and food and care, and they will soon share a new life.  Dracs reproduce asexually, and it seems they have little control over when self-fertilization takes place. Davidge seems amazed but apprehensive about what’s to come. Jerry focuses entirely on the most important ritual of their people: a recitation of lineage that explains where a Drac comes from and how they arise from their line. Struggling to equivocate and make sense of each other, Jerry gets Davidge to tell his own family line, made more complex by having had two parents. Davidge listens to Jerry’s in return. This is vitally important to Jerry, who will (of course, since this is genre fiction) die in childbirth. Davidge will have to retain this information, and will also have to care for the child.  By the halfway point of this film, it becomes difficult to believe it’s a movie from 1985. These combatants engage with one another on bases of race and gender that we’re still fighting for today, as if they were alien worlds with which we have never yet attempted to make peace. Nonbinary ace icon Jerry says, without equivocation as they prepare to bring forth life, “I’m not a woman.” Armed with the startling knowledge that all people are people, Davidge has begun to learn the Drac language. That’s good, because he’s going to need it. Jerry dies, leaving baby Zammis (Bumper Robinson) in the Terran’s barely-capable care. When this movie came out in 1985, it was seeking its audience in Star Trek fans, who had shown they could engage critically with race and gender in science fiction since 1966. However, Enemy Mine was too early for fans of Alien Nation, which wouldn’t come along until 1989 and put mpreg on the small screen for the average American family to ponder and talk about at the water cooler. Star Trek: the Next Generation wouldn’t air its controversial episode “The Outcast,” until 1992, wherein the Enterprise crew would encounter a planet to whom all gender performance is criminalized. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine would come along just one year after that, featuring a main cast member who was a woman but carried within an immortal omnisexual slug, and who had been a man just a few years before.  So, too, did the ‘90s iteration of Star Trek deal with the complications that arise from cross-racial adoption. Like other sci-fi children who grapple with the difference between who they live with and who they came from, Zammis lines up his three-fingered and clawed hand beside Davidge’s human one, and wishes he were different, wishes he were the same. Star Trek: TNG showed us Klingon, Betazoid, Cardassian, and Bajoran biracial kids who struggled in the same way. Those writers dealt with the loss of identity and stability that come from it, and the inability to separate their existence from the war, occupation, economic inequality, and racism that often cause it to exist.  But Enemy Mine got there first.  Written science fiction has always been decades ahead of both film and television, acting as a guide and a precursor to the more widely-seen types of media. Stories and novellas like Longyear’s “Enemy Mine” are like tugboats, small and mighty, dragging the barges of tv and movies out into sea. The mass of the mainstream is tough to get moving, but a stout tugboat always does its job despite the tides.  The tides were against Enemy Mine when it reached theaters. Packed with tension absent from the original novella and advertised as an action movie in space, it found its audience among fans of Star Wars; a franchise so aggressively cisnormative and heterosexual that they’d rather let a brother and sister make out than try any other arrangement, even among alien sluglords.  In the end, Enemy Mine is a sensitive sci-fi tearjerker about a bigot who sees the error of his ways, adopts the child of a genderqueer foe, and teaches that child both his own ways and the ways of the child’s lost world. In the emotional conclusion, Davidge presents himself on the Drac homeworld to recite Zammis’ litany to unite the child with his people, he does so selflessly, wanting only to repair what war and interstellar commerce have damaged. When Zammis recites his own child’s lineage, they include Davidge’s name in the line of those who brought them into the world.  Sometimes, a movie does not fail because it was in any way lacking. Art is sometimes spent too soon on an audience that is not ready to receive it.  But we might be ready now.  Enemy Mine is available for streaming on nearly every platform. Put it on when you need soft, loving sci-fi about ace and queer parenthood, or to feel some hope that a better world is not only possible, but a dream we’ve been sharing for a very long time.[end-mark] The post <i>Enemy Mine</i> Is the Queer, Anti-War Sci-Fi You’ve Been Missing appeared first on Reactor.