When Great Ideas Meet Weak Execution: The Case of Species

The past month has been bittersweet for Hollywood as news broke of the death of actor Michael Madsen. The actor left behind a legacy of tough and unforgettable characters in the likes of Reservoir Dogs, Kill Bill, and Donnie Brasco. Many actors can claim to have played major, headline-grabbing roles over the years, and while Madsen’s filmography is filled with fan favorites and cult classics, few obituaries have mentioned one of his more quirky performances — that of a black ops mercenary hunting a dangerous, half-human, half-alien hybrid in the sci-fi action-thriller Species. The film turns 30 this year, and it deserves some attention as both a nostalgic look back and a testament to the creative risks of its era, an era when the air was thick with monster movies and alien invasion paranoia.

Species was produced in 1995 and directed by Roger Donaldson (No Way Out, The Bounty). It was part monster movie, part cop thriller, and part soft science fiction. The movie opens with the U.S. government receiving two transmissions from space: one holds the key to an untapped fuel source, and the other contains an eerily specific set of instructions on how to splice alien DNA with human DNA. You can probably guess what happens next. Operating under the thumb of Dr. Xavier Fitch (Ben Kingsley), U.S. researchers create a hybrid of their own: Sil, in her formative years played by Michelle Williams. The organism was meant to be a docile and manageable combination of human and alien DNA. Instead, the U.S. government has created a monster.

Sil quickly surpasses her growth expectations, developing from a newborn to the body of a 12-year-old girl in just a few months. But her development is rocky. She suffers from violent nightmares and the early signs that her “containment” won’t be as simple as they’d hoped. When Fitch decides to end the experiment by pumping cyanide into Sil’s containment cell, she manages to escape — and the chase is on.

Fitch recruits a team of specialists to find and contain her: Madsen’s Preston Lennox, a “clean up in a bio-hazard situation” mercenary, Dr. Laura Baker (Marg Helgenberger), a molecular biologist, Dr. Stephen Arden (Alfred Molina), an anthropologist, and Dan Smithson (Forest Whitaker), a brooding empath who can sense what Sil is thinking and feeling. The team races across the country and finally into Los Angeles, where Sil, now a grown woman played by Natasha Henstridge, begins her reproductive mission. Sil is quick to adapt and learn. She also, like most mammals, is driven by her instincts. Survival. Reproduction. As the team pieces together her escape and continues to race to stay ahead of her, body after body is discovered: a train tramp, a nightclub goer, and eventually a lover. The team is desperate to stop her before the first offspring is born and her reproductive cycle can continue.

Designer Alien with a “Glass Body But with Carbon Inside”

Species was memorable from the get-go, and most of that had to do with the actual creature. The 1995 sci-fi/action thriller was another chance for surrealist artist H.R. Giger to design a truly alien lifeform. Giger was most famous for his work on the design of the xenomorph for Ridley Scott’s 1979 Alien, and when he was approached to design Sil, the titular species of this new film, he brought the same sensibilities and creativity that made Alien an immediate success.

Sil was to be both practical and aesthetic, designed by Giger “as an aesthetic warrior, also sensual and deadly.” Giger designed what Sil would look like in her final form, a design described as “a glass body but with carbon inside.” He also created several different stages of alien evolution and transformation that Sil would go through throughout the movie. Budget restraints and production limitations eventually reduced the number of alien forms Sil would take on to just a transformation cocoon and a final maternal alien body.

Giger was unimpressed with the film despite its financial success and visually memorable design. He felt that Species was too similar to his work on Alien 30 years earlier. The “punching tongue” and the film’s climax all seemed too similar to the “chestburster” moment from Alien to Giger, who even went so far as to order a reduction in effects and stunt work on set to make sure Sil was killed by a bullet to the head, not flame-throwers, which he felt were a nod to Alien 3 and Terminator 2.

Final Words

Species was a film that, despite ambition, was never considered great by critics. Dialogue was clunky, characters were underwritten, and some actors were just ill-cast. Kingsley’s Fitch is weak and almost blasé, while Whitaker’s empathy appears mostly for dramatic effect. The film hints at themes of bioethics and alien contact as well as commentary on instinctual motherhood, but it never quite touches on those deeper questions. Still, there’s something uniquely magnetic about this uneven cocktail of sci-fi and erotic horror. Writer Robert Roy Freedman drew inspiration from an article by Arthur C. Clarke, who had once written that aliens may never visit Earth, given the limited possibility for faster-than-light technology. But what if aliens managed to contact us, Freedman wondered. What if they sent a message with the plans to create their own sentient, organic version right here on Earth?

Species is both a cautionary tale of the potential fallout of bioengineering as well as a creature feature. It’s never quite in the same league as Alien or Terminator, but it still managed to amass a cult following of its own. For good reason, too. Henstridge is as otherworldly and electric in this as one could hope, while Madsen is menacing and present as the grizzled mercenary. Giger’s vision of Sil as a sexy, deadly seductress lingers long after the credits roll. Between the sizzle and the creature effects, Species stands out as an odd ’90s sci-fi classic that’s well worth watching.