Another of those films with a smashing last 30 minutes tacked on to a leisurely previous 90. This time, science-fiction is the name of the game, but director Wolfgang Petersen wants to have his cake and eat it too, by trying to graft a comic-strip emotional happy ending on to a story of an earthman and a lizard-like hermaphrodite alien stranded together on a hostile planet. Though too tedious and erratically paced for all tastes, this sort of adult outer-space combination of Hell in the Pacific and Robinson Crusoe is beautifully designed and remains very much its own film until melodrama intervenes. Dennis Quaid and Louis Gossett Jr give everything that could be asked of them, Gossett doing well to elicit sympathy rather than risibility for his scaly spacething. But it's a film that failed to find its niche with the public.

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