From SETI to Bioweapon: How Species Makes First Contact Terrifying

The recent death of actor Michael Madsen has allowed Hollywood to look back at the actor’s numerous film roles. An actor known for tough-guy roles in Reservoir Dogs, Kill Bill, and Donnie Brasco, Madsen was a cinematic icon whose most memorable roles have been grittier, more low-rent affairs. Few film retrospectives, however, have included Madsen’s unique performance as a black ops mercenary in 1995’s Species, a role that at least provided a fun challenge for Madsen’s action-star bona fides. This year marks the film’s 30th anniversary, a reminder that the year 1995 was a weirdly creative time in the annals of monster and alien cinema.

Species opened in U.S. theaters on October 6, 1995, and was directed by Roger Donaldson, a director who had made his name in Hollywood with crime and action films, most notably No Way Out and The Bounty. The hook of the film was that the U.S. government received two transmissions from outer space: one detailing a powerful new fuel source, and another detailing precise methodology for splicing alien and human DNA. Naturally, the government took the initiative to try both. Helmed by Dr. Xavier Fitch (Ben Kingsley), one hybrid was successfully created, the half-human, half-alien Sil, as she was called. In her younger days, played by Michelle Williams. The plan, according to scientists, was to have a relatively docile, controllable organism. The results, as you can probably imagine, were far more chaotic.

Sil grew at a frighteningly accelerated rate, reaching the appearance of a 12-year-old girl in only three months. But things didn’t appear to be quite as cut and dry as the government assumed. She suffered from violent nightmares, and several other clues began to reveal themselves that the organism may not be as “easy to control” as the government had initially planned. When Fitch decides the best course of action is to terminate the experiment by releasing cyanide into her containment cell, Sil breaks out, and the cat-and-mouse chase is on.

To hunt her down, Fitch enlists a small team of specialists, all of whom are hyper-competent and thinly sketched, including Madsen’s Preston Lennox, a hardboiled mercenary; Dr. Laura Baker (Marg Helgenberger), a molecular biologist; Dr. Stephen Arden (Alfred Molina), an anthropologist; and Dan Smithson (Forest Whitaker), a stock bad boy who can intuit what Sil is thinking and feeling. They chase her across the country and finally into Los Angeles, where she, now fully grown and played by Natasha Henstridge, hunts and kills to mate and reproduce. She is intelligent, adaptive, and cruelly driven by instinct. She kills a train tramp, a nightclub victim, and eventually, a man with whom she has a one-night stand. The chase across the country and into Los Angeles continues to stop her before she can reproduce with human partners and multiply exponentially.

Species: A Monster Built to Entice…and Destroy

Species, as should be obvious by now, was a monster film first, and a science fiction movie second. This isn’t to say that it was without conceptual intrigue, however. One of the most visually interesting aspects of the film was the creature design, which was helmed by surrealist artist H.R. Giger, best known for his design of the xenomorph alien from Ridley Scott’s Alien. Giger, an artist with a distinct bio-mechanical style, set out to make Sil “an aesthetic warrior, also sensual and deadly.” To that end, the final form of Sil’s alien-half that she takes toward the end of the film featured translucent skin that was described as having the “appearance of a glass body but with carbon inside.” Giger’s original design brief for Sil had included several evolutionary stages for the alien as she transformed, but as is often the case with film productions, that became prohibitively expensive. Giger did, however, end up creating a design for a transformation cocoon and the final maternal alien body that Sil takes at the climax of the film.

Species was a box office hit, but Giger was famously dissatisfied with the final product, not least of which because he thought Species was too similar to his work in Alien years before. The “punching tongue,” as well as the infamous birth scene at the end of the film, were deemed too close to the infamous “chestburster” sequence in Alien. Giger had also insisted on Sil’s death by bullet to the head, as opposed to flame-throwers that he argued had already been utilized in Alien 3 and Terminator 2.

Species also wasn’t met with much critical fanfare, in part because the dialogue was clunky and many of the characters were uninteresting or undeveloped. Kingsley’s performance as Fitch is cartoonishly amoral, and Whitaker’s empathy serves mostly to echo the obvious. The deeper themes the film only gestures toward but never delves deeply into: the ethics of playing God in a bio-engineering lab, the first contact trope in classic sci-fi storytelling, maternal instinct, and the nature of evil. In a lot of ways, though, that’s also the film’s charm, in its weirdly singular combination of old-school science fiction and erotic horror. The film’s screenwriter, Joe Nausch, had been struck by an Arthur C. Clarke article hypothesizing that aliens would never be able to visit Earth because of the incredible distance and the theoretical lack of faster-than-light travel. What if, Nausch wondered, the first alien contact came not with ships but with blueprints, for an invasive, sentient species, organic and engineered out of the DNA of Earth’s animals and humans?

Species became a low-budget allegory and a sexed-up, monster movie riff. It will probably never hold up against the grand mythos of Alien or even The Terminator, but Species is a cult classic in its own right. The performance by Henstridge is unforgettable, Madsen’s turn as the grizzled Lennox is solid, and Giger’s design work still gives it a distinctive look and feel. The movie might be uneven, but uneven is a quality that can make for memorable, especially when you’re speaking about a curiously distinctive piece of ’90s science fiction. Species endures.

Thirty years after its release, Species is not just a time capsule of the state of science fiction filmmaking when style began to sometimes outstrip substance. It’s also a reminder of some of the weirder, more memorable roles that defined an actor like Michael Madsen along the way.