A Solid Premise Undermined by B-Movie Tropes: Species Revisited

Michael Madsen died earlier this month. He was 75, and among his many credits, he will be remembered for memorable turns in Reservoir Dogs, Kill Bill, and Donnie Brasco. Little of the eulogizing has yet to mention one of Madsen’s weirder roles: as a black ops mercenary assigned to hunt a half-alien/half-human in the 1995 horror-sci-fi thriller Species, which is turning 30 years old this year. There’s a reason the film bears revisiting.

Species was a brainchild of Roger Donaldson (No Way Out, The Bounty), who came up with a concept: one night, the U.S. government receives two transmissions from space. The first describes a new fuel source; the other details “instructions on how to splice alien DNA with human DNA.” Naturally, the government follows through. Led by Dr. Xavier Fitch (Ben Kingsley), a hybrid is successfully created: Sil, played in her formative years by Michelle Williams. The goal was to create a docile, controllable organism. What the scientists created was something else entirely.

Sil quickly grows: In only three months, she looks like a 12-year-old girl. But there are problems. She suffers from violent nightmares and starts exhibiting signs that she may not be “controllable.” Fitch decides to end the experiment and release cyanide into her holding cell. Sil manages to escape, and it’s off to the races.

Hoping to track Sil down, Fitch gathers a crack team of scientists to stop her before she mates and reproduces: Madsen’s Preston Lennox, a tough-as-nails mercenary; Dr. Laura Baker (Marg Helgenberger), a molecular biologist; Dr. Stephen Arden (Alfred Molina), an anthropologist; and Dan Smithson (Forest Whitaker), a surly empath who can read what Sil is feeling. The hunt takes them around the country and eventually to L.A., where a fully-grown Sil (Natasha Henstridge) is searching for a mate to pass on her DNA. Sil is agile, intelligent, and shockingly adaptive, and will stop at nothing to continue her mission. As her victims pile up—a train tramp, a nightclub goer, a romance partner—Lennox and crew race to stop her before it’s too late.

Welcome to My Nightmare

Species had the luxury of some of the best creature design of the ’90s, by none other than H.R. Giger, whose work is perhaps most indelibly known for Alien. Giger’s work on Species strived to “design her [Sil] to become an aesthetic warrior, also sensual and deadly.” The result was unforgettable. Sil’s adult body is made of translucent skin, which Giger described as “a glass body but with carbon inside.” Giger had envisioned several stages of alien evolution for Sil’s body, but was unable to design more than one alien body morph and a cocoon she went into before emerging as an adult.

For all of his work on the creature design, Giger came away disappointed from the film, finding that it was too similar to his work on Alien and thus redundant. He likened Sil’s punching tongue to the alien from Alien, as well as the famous “birth scene” from Species, as too close a derivative of the “chestburster” scene from Alien. He even threatened to leave the project if Sil wasn’t killed by a bullet to the head (the film initially ended with Sil being killed with flame throwers) than by, as Giger put it, something that had already been done in Alien 3 and Terminator 2.

Species Falls Short, But Still a Classic Cult Creature Feature

Species was never well-received critically. The dialogue was often stilted, with characters often coming across as stock or cardboard cut-outs (Kingsley’s Fitch is amoral and unconvincing, while Whitaker’s empath has little to do but wander around ominously muttering foregone conclusions). Themes the film gestures at, but never fully embraces: bioethics, first contact, and the dangers of maternal instinct. (Plus: Michael Biehn shows up in a small but key role. The fun never ends.) Still, the film, uneven though it is, has a certain magnetism to it. Feldman, the screenwriter, read an article by Arthur C. Clarke that speculated that there was a very low chance that aliens would ever visit Earth, given the trillions of galaxies and the fact that faster-than-light speed travel was currently not an option. The question Feldman asked: What if, instead of physical visitors, extraterrestrials had sent a transmission to Earth with a plan to build something organic instead? A new, invasive species that came from Earth’s DNA?

Species ends up becoming both a cautionary tale and a creature feature at once. It might never be in the same conversation as Alien, let alone The Terminator, but Species at least found a cult following it rightly deserved. Between Henstridge’s ethereal performance, Madsen’s grizzled earthiness, and Giger’s unforgettable design, Species remains a ’90s sci-fi oddity that’s still worth checking out.

Species is a time capsule of what science fiction looked like when style frequently trumped substance, and an early standout in the career of the late Michael Madsen.