"Back home."
When I was a kid, like every self-respecting middle class American family, we owned a VCR. Unlike most families, we didn't have any rhyme or reason as to what movies we owned. We didn't buy movies for ourselves, and so we owned whatever movies we received as gifts. This resulted in only a handful of very random movies. What few movies we did own we watched over and over. Maybe a hundred times, we'd quote them, we'd make fun of them, the language in these movies became a part of our vernacular growing up. One such movie was 'Willow.' We called each other 'peck' for years.
Another wonderful movie that we owned was called 'Enemy Mine'. Enemy mine stars Dennis Quaid and Louis Gosset Jr. as the Drac. The story is about a future space war between humans and Dracs (the aliens). Quaid and Gosset's characters shoot each other down in a space ship battle royal and get stuck on a hostile planet. They end up cooperating in order to survive and becoming friends. When other humans are found on the planet and become a threat to Gosset, Quaid decides to side with his new friend instead of his own kind. I know what you are thinking, and yes, it's Dances with Wolves, with aliens.
It's a weird movie. Yet it does have it's appeal. I cannot watch it objectively. It's so familiar and ingrained, that I don't have the ability to see it with new eyes. Although, the effects are terrible.
It's available as a streaming movie on Netflix. I encourage anyone who reads this blog to go and watch it, for the first time if you've never seen it before. And tell me, is this a good movie or is it a joke?
Description from Netflix:
Earthling Davidge (Dennis Quaid) is one of many space warriors facing a brutal battle against the reptilian Draconians, among them the soldier Jeriba (Louis Gossett Jr.). But when the pilots' spaceships crash-land on the same planet, these foes must team up to stay alive. The stakes climb higher after Jeriba gives birth to a baby Drac, and Davidge becomes foster father to his own natural enemy as he tries to survive in a hostile land.
