Hacker Cinema
Enemy Mine
1985 · Film · 108 min
Directed by Wolfgang Petersen
A soldier from Earth crashlands on an alien world after sustaining battle damage. Eventually he encounters another survivor, but from the enemy species he was fighting; they band together to survive on this hostile world. In the end the human finds himself caring for his enemy in a completely unexpected way.
2 positive1 neutralfrom 3 commenters
Where to watch
No streaming data for this title.
3 comments on Hacker News
I get the sense that you would like some adult themes, but not too slow?
Top of my mind (and in no specific order) would be:
- Dark City
- The Thirteenth Floor
- City of the Lost Children
- Tron (original and maybe new one)
- Interstellar
- Inception
- A Clockwork Orange
- Her (very relevant to our times)
- Dune (2021 version)
- Brazil
- The Martian
- Children of Men
- Edge of Tomorrow (most like Marvelverse on this list but still very good)
- Moon
- Twelve Monkeys
- Upgrade
- The Fifth Element
- Contact
- Okja
- District 9
- Predestination (very relevant to our times)
- Serenity (but might need some prep from the tv show before watching)
- World on a Wire
- The Abyss
- Minority Report (very relevant in our times)
- The Fly
- Videodrome
- Equilibrium
- Strange Days
- The Andromeda Strain (relevant after Covid)
- eXistenZ (trippy but I loved it when it came out and was only around your sons age)
- In Time (interesting class dynamics on display)
- Enemy Mine
- Franklyn (some interesting takes on mental illness)
- The Arrival
I don't study philosophy, but having spent a whole lot my life depressed and having it filled with long periods of solitude I do spend a lot of time thinking. What I find really interesting is how much philosophy I've rejected over the years for various reasons, only to later interdependently come to the conclusion that it was true.
The religions of the world are littered with actually very profound insight, for instance, but a lot of it is hidden behind parables and mythology, interwoven with narratives meant to maintain cultures and power structures, and generally favors the lies-to-children versions, but it's there.
I am reminded of a movie, Enemy Mine, wherein a human is learning an alien language in part via a religious text. After reading a passage bearing a remarkable similarity to "turn the other cheek", he looks up to his teacher and says "I've heard all this before", to which the alien's reply is "Of course. Truth is truth". One of the lessons of empiricism is that truths are repeatable --that we can both do the experiment, take them measurement, and produce the same result--, and even though much of philosophical thought is non-empirical that pattern seems to hold.
It seems to me, that one rejects a lot of these ideas because they seem wrong, are too simple, or even tautological, but once you've taken the long route and arrived at the same conclusion, you find that the universe had been screaming it at you your whole life and you just didn't really understand what it was saying because you lacked the context.
And they're difficult things to talk about because of that. Communication requires a shared context for mutual understanding, but often we lack that. Take any industry or specialization, which has developed its own language. Terms like "network", "database", or "stack" have meanings within the general public awareness, but within IT have much more specific definitions. When someone who uses this language daily tries to explain things to someone who doesn't, the other person's understanding will be different than what was intended because they don't understand the package of specifics that come with them, and likewise when they attempt to communicate back we sometimes have a different understanding than intended because we understand those terms in the context of that package of related concepts.
I think this is the cause of a lot of animosity between various communities. For instance, in academic feminism, the term "patriarchy" has a more nuanced meaning than it does to the general public, just like the terms "network" and "database". So when a feminist talks about the patriarchy they mean one thing, but what people often hear is something different. I think it is the same with a lot of academic, or religious, philosophy.
There's this term "karma" for which the lies-to-children version is "do good things and good things will happen to you". This is provably false, so a lot of people naturally reject it. However, if you do good things the world is actually slightly better for it, right? Even if not for you specifically. And if we all do good things, as a society, then those good things will happen to more people and you have a higher chance of having good things happen to you. If you live in a society where people tend to treat each other well, you'll all be better off than if you treat each other poorly. If you put in the work now to make the world a better place, your children will get to live in that better world, as you live in a better world made by the efforts of your parents and their parents before them. And of course the reverse is also true, if you insist on making the world a worse place through your actions. And in that context, "karma" doesn't seem so ridiculous anymore does it?
Of course, it's entirely possible that I am only seeing what I want to see. That I have, through my own lens of understanding, reinterpreted such things to fit reality as I see it.
An old and maybe not terribly popular one is Enemy Mine. There are bad guys, but they're humans, and they only play a role near the end. But they aren't primary to the story. It's mostly a story of two people thrown together in a shitty situation and learning to get along despite their initial hatred for each other.
There are lots of scifi movies where the story only barely, rather than primarily, deals with the idea of good guys versus bad guys, if it puts them together directly at all. Moon, The Martian, Gravity are recent ones. Interstellar, in its way.
Less true of fantasy which pulls its stories from the idea of grand epics with noble warriors fighting monsters and villains.
Action movies without an idea of good guy and bad guy is a challenge. Maybe I'll think of one while I lie in bed tonight but off the top of my head there aren't any occurring to me.