The Cast of Species Was Great—So What Went Wrong?

A few weeks ago, we lost another Hollywood legend. Michael Madsen, a performer best known for Reservoir Dogs, Kill Bill, and Donnie Brasco, passed away earlier this month at the age of 73. The actor’s most enduring roles were often those where he played hard-boiled, primal men of few words, and while there have been many tributes to Madsen in recent days, few have mentioned one of the actor’s more unique performances. Yes, Michael Madsen appeared in a very ’90s monster movie. Allow me to fill you in.

Species, now 30, is a rare thing in 2024, a pre-Planet of the Apps alien invasion thriller that feels genuinely paranoid. Directed by No Way Out and The Bounty’s Roger Donaldson, Species stars Ben Kingsley as a government researcher who spearheads the development of a new race of human/alien hybrids. As in, creatures designed in a lab using alien DNA. Within months, one of these synthetically created aliens is on the loose, and the only people who can stop her are an unlikely group of government functionaries, each with their particular skills. Or, as Ben Kingsley puts it in the film’s first few moments: “You’re a black ops mercenary, Madsen’s a Russian boat-captain, this guy over here is a mystic. It’s all so… eclectic.”

Species turns 30 this year, and to celebrate, I’m giving it a belated lookback, looking at what makes it so intriguing and, yes, what makes it so clunky. Spoilers ahead.

Episode 1: Mute Alien Bitch Wreaks Havoc, Creates Monster Fan Club

Species begins in the style of all the greatest movies that ever were (Jurassic Park, Leviathan, Leftovers), with the U.S. government intercepting two transmissions from deep space. The first contains detailed plans for a new, sustainable form of rocket fuel. The second has instructions for interbreeding alien DNA with human DNA. Naturally, the government chooses to move forward with the experiment. Enter Ben Kingsley, here playing scientist/medical officer Dr. Xavier Fitch. Fitch and his team successfully create a hybrid, whom he names Sil (Michelle Williams, in her younger years). Fitch was expecting a calm, placid organism that could be manipulated and controlled, the sort of useful intellectual property an invading alien species might use in their efforts to take over the world.

He got one, all right, but it was a good bit more dangerous than that.

Sil progresses from embryo to preteen in a matter of months, and even then, something feels “off.” She has nightmares about violence, for one, and soon there are clues that she’s not quite the pliable new species that Fitch was hoping for. He eventually decides to terminate the experiment by introducing cyanide into Sil’s cell, but she kills her prison guards, escapes, and heads off for her never-ending tour of the United States.

Fitch recruits the help of Madsen’s Preston Lennox, a matter-of-fact mercenary; Marg Helgenberger’s Dr. Laura Baker, a molecular biologist; Alfred Molina’s Dr. Stephen Arden, an anthropologist; and Forest Whitaker’s Dan Smithson, a dark, moody empath who can see what Sil is thinking. Together, they follow Sil’s trail as she travels the country (Atlanta, Boston, New York) and eventually settles in Los Angeles, where, as a fully grown Natasha Henstridge, she begins her quest to find and mate with another human. That way, she can reproduce and create offspring that could eventually overwhelm humanity. (No judgment here.)

The Team: Hot Women Scientists and Hot Guys with Guns

Henstridge’s Sil is part quick-witted femme fatale, part attack animal. She’s constantly adapting and evolving, and she’s a master at using her biology to manipulate the men around her. The body count begins to rise (train tramp! Nightclub victim! Firefighter boyfriend!) as the crew races to catch up with her and develop a cure before she starts reproducing, which could happen very soon. (Needless to say, this is where the notion of “hypergamy” comes from.)

As to that group assembled to take her down, only Marg Helgenberger’s character has a real personality. Fitch is amoral, Kingsley can’t make him work, and Whitaker just gets to be a brooding stoic who sees what everyone else is thinking. Madsen’s Preston, meanwhile, is a running gun-and-shouting match who might’ve made more sense as an arms dealer on Homicide: Life on the Street than in a sci-fi monster movie. There’s a running undercurrent in the movie about the responsibility of working with powerful, invasive, and ultimately alien forms of bioengineering. There’s something in there about alien contact, about sexuality and the maternal instinct, but they’re more alluded to than followed up on.

Meet the Aliens: Giger Designed the Mutant Bioweapon

The most successful aspect of Species, and by far, is the creature design. Legendary surrealist and monster designer H.R. Giger is best known for his work on Ridley Scott’s Alien franchise, but his work on Species was just as stunning. Giger wanted Sil to “be an aesthetic warrior, also sensual and deadly,” and that’s exactly what he created. Sil, both in the cocoon she morphs into when she escapes the lab and in her final form, is breathtakingly alien. Her skin, Giger later wrote, was “transparent, a glass body but with carbon inside.” Giger originally designed three full forms of the creature as it matured into an alien adult, but time and budget issues cut his work to the transformation cocoon and the climactic mother alien Sil becomes at the end.

Giger has since said that he didn’t love the film, feeling that it was far too similar to his work on Alien, from the “punching tongue” she displays to the climactic birth moment, which he saw as too close a cousin to the “chestburster” sequence from Alien. Giger reportedly made a deal with the producers that Sil would die by a bullet to the head rather than the flamethrowers they’d originally planned, as he felt they were too close a cousin to Alien 3 and Terminator 2, also set in L.A.

Species, like so many of its ilk, wasn’t well-received by critics, and it’s easy to see why. The dialogue is paper-thin the characters are mostly two-dimensional, and none of the story’s big questions have any real meat on them. But the movie is still oddly watchable, the mishmash of ’90s sci-fi tropes and horror movie sex panic is just so much the product of its time. Feldman, who wrote the script, was reportedly working from an Arthur C. Clarke article speculating that aliens would never visit Earth, given the near impossibility of faster-than-light travel. What if, Feldman speculated, extraterrestrials made contact using blueprints for an organic creature built from our DNA?

Species is both an adventure story and a warning, a pre-Internet glimpse of what might come next. It’s neither as good as Alien nor Terminator, but it is an odd sort of monster movie in its own right.

It’s also a movie that allowed Madsen to own a scene in a way he never would again, which is the sort of gift that only a movie like Species can offer an actor. Maybe next time I need to explain one of his more unusual roles, I can write about Murder in the First.