Guilty Pleasure Alert: It’s Time to Rewatch Species

Earlier this month, Michael Madsen, an actor best known for his roles in Reservoir Dogs, Kill Bill, and Donnie Brasco, died at the age of 74. In the wake of his passing, many social media users have revisited some of Madsen’s best and most popular works. But in the remembrances that have since popped up, there has been a relative lack of attention for one of Madsen’s more esoteric performances: his turn as black ops mercenary Preston Lennox in the 1995 sci-fi horror classic Species. While Madsen plays an important supporting role, the film itself—which turns 30 this year—is worth revisiting as well, not just for nostalgic purposes but also for a reminder of the sorts of risks Hollywood was still willing to take even amid the sci-fi boom and the seemingly endless stream of creature features and alien-invasion films of the ’90s.

Directed by Roger Donaldson (No Way Out, The Bounty), Species was never intended to be some slick space opera or ponderous hard sci-fi drama. It was instead something closer to a pulpy throwback to the gothic horror of yore. The first 20 minutes are taken up with a setup: the U.S. government is investigating two signals that have come from outer space. The first contains the design plans for a never-before-seen fuel source, and the second contains very precise instructions on how to splice human DNA with alien DNA. The obvious next step is taken: human-alien hybrids are created, and the experiments begin.

The chief scientist in the team is Dr. Xavier Fitch (Ben Kingsley), who uses one of the specimens to create Sil (played by Michelle Williams in her childhood and Natasha Henstridge as an adult). But rather than being some docile, obedient creature, Sil is something new and terrifying. She ages faster than normal—getting to the look of a 12-year-old within three months—and the film uses these early scenes to foreshadow her true nature. She has violent nightmares; signs start to surface that she might not be as “controllable” as the project had been designed for her to be. When Dr. Fitch orders the death of Sil’s cell with a cyanide gas bomb, she has the presence of mind to escape. Thus begins the manhunt for Sil.

Leading the team to her are Fitch; Dr. Laura Baker (Marg Helgenberger), a molecular biologist; Dr. Stephen Arden (Alfred Molina), an anthropologist; Dan Smithson (Forest Whitaker), a brooding empath who can read Sil’s feelings; and Madsen’s Preston Lennox, a hard-bitten mercenary with a no-nonsense approach. The team travels across the country and into Los Angeles, where Sil, now fully grown and played by Natasha Henstridge, must mate to create more of her kind. She is clever and manipulative, highly intelligent, and able to adapt to her environment with frightening rapidity. She is also, quite literally, built to kill. All the dead bodies are just collateral damage for a creature whose prime directive is to find a mate and reproduce at all costs.

A Beautiful Beast

One of the major selling points of Species, especially on release, was the look of the titular creature. Designed by legendary surrealist artist H.R. Giger (best known for his work on Alien, particularly the xenomorph), the intent was to make Sil “a sensual, deadly aesthetic warrior.” The character design was suitably jaw-dropping: translucent, bulbous, and vaguely vaginal, Sil’s final form had been described as having skin that was “almost like a glass body but with carbon inside it.” Giger initially had plans for three to five stages of alien/human DNA evolution for Sil, but given production limitations, had to settle for a transformation cocoon and then the climactic maternal alien body.

Sil, the Alien Actress Revisits Species at 30

In the years since the film’s release, Giger himself has been critical of Species. He felt, in part, that it too closely aped some of the key design elements of his work in Alien: in particular, he didn’t like the similarity between the “punching tongue” and, most egregiously, the design of Sil’s birth scene, which he saw as a conscious rehash of the “chestburster” scene in Alien. He felt so strongly about the latter that he contacted the producers and made sure Sil was finally dispatched by a bullet to the head rather than by the fire department with flame-throwers, which he said too strongly resembled Alien 3 and Terminator 2.

Species also wasn’t a critical success. The dialogue was frequently excruciating, and many of the human characters were little more than expository mouthpieces. Kingsley’s Fitch was amoral and far from charismatic, and Whitaker’s empath mostly lurked in the background, muttering observations that everyone else should already have made. The bioethics, the alien contact, the maternal instinct, the core metaphors that the film’s screenwriter, Frank Darabont, took from an article by Arthur C. Clarke suggesting aliens would never visit Earth because no FTL drives were possible: these are all teased and not fully developed.

What remains is something that’s more than a little difficult to watch, all these years later. At its heart, Species was a lovechild of both the hard sci-fi of the ’70s and the erotic body horror of body horror films that continued into the ’90s. The result is something of a triumph of style over substance: something to appreciate and admire, but not always to enjoy. Sil is undoubtedly the movie’s biggest draw, though; between the design work by Giger, the playful performances by Williams and then Henstridge, and the gonzo action sequences, there’s a lot to like. It may not get the same rapturous praise that Alien or The Terminator do when they’re discussed among action and sci-fi fans, but Species is its own thing. Between the throwback design sensibilities, the pulpy twists, and the atmosphere, it’s a film that, for better and worse, has long outlasted its expiration date.

Species is now available to stream on Netflix.