Species Is Basically Alien Meets Basic Instinct

Hollywood recently lost actor Michael Madsen, whose 35-year career saw him star in countless iconic, memorable movies like Reservoir Dogs, Kill Bill, and Donnie Brasco, among others. One of Madsen’s best roles, for fans of the critically underrated slasher flick Off-Ramp, has received scant acknowledgment since the news of his passing: as a black ops hitman, tracking a violent, telepathic, part-human, part-alien hybrid in the 1995 science fiction monster movie Species. The film, about a creature that was originally an experiment in bioethics and genetic manipulation, but now poses a threat to all of mankind, turns 30 this year, and is a worthy legacy piece for Madsen, if only to spotlight the thrills and weirdness of a film that dared to make bold, creative moves, in an age of sequels, monster movies, and alien paranoia.

Species was directed by Roger Donaldson (No Way Out, The Bounty), and very much felt of its time, as well as ahead of it in key ways. It took a conventional but tantalizing science fiction hook and ran with it. The film opens with a narrative premise that’s simultaneously familiar but fresh: the U.S. government receives two radio transmissions from outer space. The first contains details on an unknown, revolutionary fuel source; the second has specific instructions on how to splice alien DNA with human DNA. Naturally, the government follows through. Under the leadership of Dr. Xavier Fitch (Ben Kingsley), they splice human and alien genetic material to create a hybrid organism. Named Sil, she is played in her early childhood years by Michelle Williams. The expectation of the team is that the hybrid will create a docile organism with a controllable amount of the human genome, but that’s not what happens.

Sil, as it turns out, adapts quickly. In only three months, she has reached the mental and physical development of a 12-year-old child. But she’s still not right. She has violent, disturbed nightmares, and subtle indications of her increased violence and intelligence make it clear that Sil is not, in fact, as “containable” as her creators originally thought. As Fitch and the team decide to kill the experiment by releasing cyanide gas into the chamber that Sil is contained in, she discovers a ventilation shaft and escapes. From there, the movie is essentially an action flick, pitting a government team of specialists against a bio-weapon they created and cannot control.

Fitch, who wants Sil dead before she goes completely feral, assembles a team of specialists. There’s Madsen’s Preston Lennox, a stoic, unemotional mercenary; Dr. Laura Baker (Marg Helgenberger), a molecular biologist; Dr. Stephen Arden (Alfred Molina), an anthropologist; and Dan Smithson (Forest Whitaker), a brooding, sensitive empath who is the only character that can intuitively understand what Sil is feeling and thinking. The team follows her from the Washington, D.C. research facility to Los Angeles, where Sil, fully grown and played by Natasha Henstridge, seeks to mate and reproduce. Henstridge’s performance is savvy and unsettling, even in the most ludicrous of scenes; Sil is intelligent, adaptive, and prey-driven, and while a sexual element was a crucial factor, she’s far more animalistic than romantic. She kills a train tramp, a nightclub goer, and eventually her would-be lover, all in the name of making copies of herself as quickly as possible.

The Monster: Sil

Sil herself, of course, is the thing that many people remember most from Species, and the creature design by surrealist artist H.R. Giger is its own special element. Giger, who would go on to design the xenomorph for Ridley Scott’s Alien, also designed Sil, whom Giger called “an aesthetic warrior, also sensual and deadly.” He explained his intention of a creature who had “a glass body but with carbon inside,” a striking idea that, in combination with Sil’s increased intelligence and violent behavior, creates a compelling piece of science fiction horror. Giger wanted to use Sil as a canvas to show alien DNA as it evolved in different stages, but production realities limited him to a transformation cocoon and the “alien birth scene” in the finale.

In the end, while the movie was a commercial success and would inspire a 1998 sequel of the same name (as well as a television series that lasted two seasons), Giger was largely dissatisfied with the end product. He felt the movie was simply too similar to his earlier work on Alien, particularly the “punching tongue” and the climactic birth scene, which he considered a rehash of the “chestburster” scene from Alien. So invested was Giger in this point that he contacted the filmmakers directly to make sure Sil was not killed by flame-throwers, which to Giger’s mind was a callback to Aliens (better) and Alien 3 (worse), and insisted that she be killed by a bullet to the head.

Species, for all its promise, was not a great film, though it’s difficult not to be tantalized by the threadbare ideas that Feldman hints at and does not expand upon. The dialogue is mostly weak; the characters, outside of a few select pieces, feel one-note. Kingsley is hammy, even for Kingsley, and Whitaker’s empathy is mostly just on the sidelines narrating the obvious. The themes of the movie—the possibilities and perils of alien contact, bioethics and genetic research, maternal instinct—are tantalizing, but mostly unexamined. And yet there’s a knowing exploitation element to the movie’s sexploitation blend of science fiction and erotic horror that resonates. Feldman wrote the screenplay after reading an article by Arthur C. Clarke on why humans would never see extraterrestrial life in our lifetime (long story short: the universe is just too big, faster-than-light travel is unlikely). What if, Feldman wondered, extraterrestrial contact with Earth was not immediate, but came through with blueprints for a product that could be built with Earth’s organic material? An alien organism, designed to seduce, take over, and multiply as quickly as possible?

Species, then, was both a cautionary tale and a creature feature, all at once. It might never have the production values or the staying power of Alien or Terminator 2, but as its fever dream of a film, Species was the brainchild of a writer who spent his time thinking about what science fiction cinema could and would be, even as he mined it for ideas. It found its cult audience because it dared to ask big questions, was willing to push back against misogyny and biological reductionism, and had bold, striking visual and narrative ideas that had never been done before.

Thirty years later, Species is a time capsule of science fiction at a particular moment in time: one when style and atmosphere sometimes outshone substance, and Madsen could find an unexpected, exciting role to play, and make it all his own.