Species: Where Good Design Meets Bad Dialogue

Earlier this month, the world of Hollywood lost the unique talent that was actor Michael Madsen, an actor best known for his appearances in the cult classic Reservoir Dogs, as well as in Kill Bill and Donnie Brasco, among many other smaller fan-favorite parts. As many fans have written their tributes to Madsen on social media in recent days, few have taken the time to mention one of his odder parts

one as a black ops mercenary tasked with hunting down an elite government agent charged with capturing a fast-growing, half-human, half-alien hybrid: his role in the 1995 cult sci-fi thriller Species. The film, which is turning 30 years old this year, was a bit of a wild ride when it was released in an era defined by the rise of monster movies and a newfound paranoia about aliens.

Directed by Roger Donaldson (No Way Out, The Bounty), the film was a weird blend of slasher horror, high-octane action, and low-key sci-fi. The premise starts with two transmissions being sent from outer space: one with details on a brand new fuel source and the other with precise instructions on how to splice alien DNA with human DNA. The government decides to take the bait. Working with (and under) the supervision of Dr. Xavier Fitch (Ben Kingsley), a team of genetic researchers mixes human and alien DNA in a lab and creates Sil, played in her youth by Michelle Williams. The experiment, they expect, will result in a benign and easily controlled specimen. Instead, they end up with a monster.

Sil grows at a rapid rate. Within just three months, she has the physical development of a 12-year-old girl. But something about her isnt right. She has violent nightmares, and there are clues around the lab that Sil isnt as containable as they were counting on. After deciding to end the project by injecting cyanide into her cell, Fitchs team is surprised when Sil escapes instead. From here, its a mad dash to track her down before she can find and mate with a human male and start spreading like, well, like a virus.

Led by Fitch, a team of specialists is organized to include Madsens Preston Lennox, a taciturn mercenary with orders to kill Sil, as well as 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 Sils thoughts and feelings. They head to Los Angeles, where Sil, now in her adult form and played by Natasha Henstridge, has been seeking out a partner in crime. Shes smart and adaptive, both high-tech and very much, it turns out, an animal at heart. After killing a train tramp, then a club goer, then one of her team, then her lover, the team has to work together to stop her from reproducing with an alien life form created from the stolen DNA (that will, we are led to believe, be able to reproduce at an alarming rate).

Building a Monster Designed to Seduce and Kill

One of the most immediately recognizable features of Species was the eponymous alien itself, who was designed by none other than surrealist artist H.R. Giger, who first gained notoriety by designing the titular xenomorph for the Alien franchise. Giger wanted Sil to be an aesthetic warrior, also sensual and deadly. His designs for Sil, with the final form of the creature featuring translucent flesh described as a glass body but with carbon inside, were as jaw-dropping as Aliens. The budget and production timelines kept Giger from fully realizing his vision for the creature, which he initially wanted to go through a series of evolutionary stages as it grew, and he was ultimately limited to a transformation cocoon and one, glorious final form as a maternal alien (described, with no small touch of hubris, by the character of Fitch in the movie as the ultimate mother.).

Despite the creatures designs and Species more-than-respectable box office returns, Giger was disappointed in the film. He considered Species to be too derivative of his earlier work with Alien, from the punching tongue to the copycat birth scene that was a direct nod to the chestburster scene from the 1979 film. Giger was so frustrated with the production of Species that he forced the film to kill Sil with a bullet to the head, rather than the flame-throwers used by characters in the film, which he said were imitating Alien 3 and Terminator 2.

Species Was a Curious Mix of Ideas and Had Some Issues

Despite the strange opportunities for exploration around themes of bioethics, first contact with alien life forms, and motherhood, most of the themes in the film were just hinted at and never quite mined or dug into. The dialogue is clunky, and the characters, except Fitch, whom Kingsley plays as an entirely amoral mad scientist, and the effusive Whitaker, who mostly walks around saying the obvious in a cool monotone, are rather flat. The antagonist, played by Henstridge, is a cold-blooded killer (murdering several in rather gruesome ways as the film rolls on) who is also an inhuman monster with access to the basic instincts of human sexuality and reproduction. The film rarely grapples with these facts. Its a sex show, and also a horror show, and mostly just lets the audience experience the psychosexual thrills (at times, the horror) without comment.

A major inspiration for screenwriter Gary Feldman was an article by science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke in which the latter theorized that aliens would never come to Earth because faster-than-light travel was just far too unlikely. But what if, Feldman asked himself, aliens did have a way of contacting Earth? What if they had a way of circumventing such physics by sending inorganic and organic blueprints? An invasive, sentient species built out of Earths DNA with one objective: to rapidly reproduce and overtake the Earth. The result was a film that played as both a cautionary tale about technology and a vintage 99s creature feature.

Species wasnt a critical hit, though audiences loved it. The dialogue was stilted, and many of the characters fell flat, including, at times, Fitch. The film plays more as a glimpse of what 1990s science fiction was like when style often overtook substance (budget and special effects budgets being chief among them) and when actors like Madsen were still getting roles in strange and unexpected corners of Hollywood. For that, and the memories it provides for many who grew up with the film in the 1990s, Species may never stand beside Alien or The Terminator, but it built its own, unique, if odd cult following.

Thirty years later, Species is a time capsule of a simpler time in science fiction, of Madsens younger days in Hollywood, and of a film that was trying to be something both unique and homage to its horror movie and sci-fi antecedents, all at the same time.