Ben Kingsley and Forest Whitaker Deserved Better in Species

Michael Madsen’s film roles were always a touch off-kilter; what could be grittier than a hardened Alabaman working for the New York Mafia in Donnie Brasco? That gave the Reservoir Dogs and Kill Bill actor’s parts a particular quality, one where you never quite knew what to expect from his next turn. His movie roles and television appearances were many, and a dedicated fan base will recall his unique work in varied cinema, from David Lynch’s neo-noir The Straight Story to Quentin Tarantino’s flicks like Kill Bill and Pulp Fiction. But according to some of the more recent tributes, few have paused to remember his role in a 1995 genre classic, as the head of a black ops organization out to kill an alien-human hybrid in the sci-fi thriller Species. As it turns 30 this year, it might be an apt moment to revisit.

Directed by Roger Donaldson (No Way Out, The Bounty), Species was a lurid fusion of Alien, The Brood, and The Terminator in a new digital age flush with hordes of monster movies and conspiracy-hunting alien paranoia. The plot is simple, yet arresting. The United States government receives two transmissions from outer space: one, a schematic for a new fuel source; the other, instructions on how to splice alien DNA with human DNA. The government takes the bait. Sil, the first hybrid, is born in a clandestine lab overseen by Dr. Xavier Fitch (Ben Kingsley). Michelle Williams plays Sil in her early years, but the experiment was a dud: Sil develops and matures at a terrifying rate. After just three months, she has reached the appearance of a 12-year-old girl, but even at that early age, it becomes clear that Sil has some…issues.

Violent nightmares are one clue: in another early scene, she’s menaced by the station mouse, and its bloodied corpse hints at the carnage to come. Fitch’s plan to control the experiment backfires when he decides to terminate her, releasing cyanide into her cell. As he and his staff vacate the room, Sil transforms herself into a full-grown woman and escapes the facility through a sewer grate. Madsen, and the other four characters he is pitted against (see below), are assigned to track her down before she kills and breeds, producing an army of species at an alarming rate.

Character Motivations and Their Inspirations

The team Fitch assembles to track Sil down before she breeds is an odd bunch, comprising Madsen’s Preston Lennox, a taciturn mercenary; Dr. Laura Baker (Marg Helgenberger), a molecular biologist; Dr. Stephen Arden (Alfred Molina), an anthropologist; and Dan Smithson (Forest Whitaker), a brooding loner with empathic skills and the ability to read what Sil is thinking or feeling. Their cross-country manhunt eventually leads them to Los Angeles, and a fully grown Sil (Natasha Henstridge), out in the world, hunting for a mate to help her reproduce.

Henstridge was perfect casting. She plays Sil as a mysterious femme fatale, animalistic and sleek, intuitive and inquisitive, and both wild and domesticated by turns. Fieldman was influenced by The Story of O (a novel by Anne Desclos, published in 1954) for his script. The parallels are easy to see: trained to be subservient and eager to please, Sil nonetheless holds the upper hand in encounters where she is the object of men’s desires. A scene that has become a pop culture touchstone involved Sil in a “seduction” booth at a peep show, talking to and charming a client. The private performances last for days, as Sil’s alien organism grows dangerously. At one point, the script and the film posit: “If the fetus in a woman is growing uncontrollably, which it is, what kind of mother would it make?”

How to Kill the Alien-Human Hybrid: Guns and Ammo

Species was always going to be an unusual project, a visual treatise on extraterrestrial influence, bioethics, and the fusion of human and alien DNA against a backdrop of conspiracy-hunting Cold War intrigue. Much of it worked: the dialogue was sometimes campy, the special effects staid by today’s standards, and many of the characters (save perhaps for Madsen’s and Whitaker’s) were pretty thin. Yet Feldman’s screenplay was eerie and beguiling in its blend of science fiction and erotic horror, an atmospheric and relentless thriller that mixed its philosophical issues (motherhood, bioethics, the dangers of science run amok) with gory action-movie bloodshed.

Feldman based his screenplay on an article by Arthur C. Clarke, which argued that the aliens have never visited Earth due to the astronomical time it would take to cross interstellar distances. Clarke mused: What if aliens had come in contact with Earth less conventionally? Species’ third act, as Sil and her human boyfriend Milo (Ryan Merriman) drive across the city, could have come from a dispatch from Chernobyl or the Chernyshev Bridge, which was the name for the cosmic umbilicus that would connect Earth to alien life forms. But in a nice twist, the idea for Species wasn’t just about sci-fi menace: it was also a love story, because Milo sees Sil for what she is and is ready to mate with her.

Species, the Perfect Monster for Seduction and Mayhem

If there is one aspect of Species that stood out (aside from Madsen and company’s performances), it is the alien-human hybrid Sil herself. When it was announced that H.R. Giger was coming on board as the creature designer, the idea became a seductive lure. The Swiss surrealist was most famous for his work in Alien, and the creature known simply as the xenomorph quickly became one of cinema’s best-known and most enduring. Species’ screenwriter, Dan Feldman, was aware of this, and he certainly did not want Giger’s next project to be an unambitious rehash.

Giger wanted to make Sil “an aesthetic warrior, also sensual and deadly.” He was adamant about the contours of her design. In her final, sexualized form, Sil had translucent skin: in Giger’s own words, a “glass body but with carbon inside.” He had initially planned four or five stages of alien evolution for Sil, with a series of evolutionary progressions occurring as the creature developed (effectively a metamorphosis from Sil to the full-on alien mother). But Giger was limited by the practicalities of production, though he was able to realize some key elements (the transformation cocoon and the body the mature alien mother takes at the end). The design also underwent changes through development: Giger was dissatisfied with the final version and cited the film’s color palette as a key gripe, though production designer Craig Stearns shot back by saying the film didn’t green-light Giger’s preferred palette until shooting had started.

Despite his issues with the design, production, and even the director, Giger has often been reverential about his work on Species. At the time of its release, he recalled a conversation with Ridley Scott where the two compared notes about the direction the sequel to Alien might take. Giger said he and Scott agreed that a follow-up to Alien would “just be a rehash, a monster in a garbage can.”

Production details aside, Giger was incensed that Species was “a copy of Alien.” The creature design, the violent birth scene, even the singular “punching tongue,” seemed too familiar for Giger, who was famously cantankerous. But Giger wasn’t through with Species: during production, he sent letters to Feldman and Whitaker (the director) demanding the script be altered to kill Sil by bullet to the head (Feldman’s original script) rather than, as shown in the final cut, with flame-throwers and jets of acid (images Giger said were too similar to those in Alien 3 and Terminator 2).

Species’ Legacy and the Species Feature Film (I Shouldn’t Need to Say It, But Spoilers Follow)

Species was a minor sensation, the sci-fi creature feature for an age enthralled with bloodshed and digital effects, lapped up and beamed back to cable television in time slots after Baywatch or Dino Spike. The film was never a great critical success, though it might not have deserved one. The writing was on the wall: Species was, for better or worse, a TV movie with crossover potential, a pulpy thriller for teens and students bored with other alien movies and tired of year-old movie tie-in VHS tapes.

Species never got the follow-up it so clearly deserved, though a video game was produced to capitalize on Henstridge’s otherworldly beauty. The game is mostly infamous (available for the Sega Genesis and Game Gear, it’s one of video game history’s great, arch-racism power-ups). Species is still remembered fondly for its mixture of stolid style and low-level sociological horror: in a script that mines familiar ground but does so with a knowing wink, it can be very effective, and wholly entertaining.

The movie may never have been as grand as Alien, The Terminator, or The Thing, but it is its creature, unmistakably different, and with two performances worth the price of admission. Species was a cautionary tale, a sci-fi story with all the cerebral muscle of an Asimov novelette for the special-effects age, and a reflection on ’90s filmmaking where style frequently trumped substance. Three decades later, Species is a time capsule of its time and a film for its time. It might just be the perfect way to remember Michael Madsen.