Species (1995) – Review

It’s been said that men are from Mars and women are from Venus, but in 1995 we got a third option that gave the gender divide something of an extraterrestrial shake up. The movie was Species and it came with a surprisingly lavish budget and some interestingly overdue social points that suggested that this weirdly horny close encounter might actually be some sort of spiritual successor to Ridley Scott’s Alien – a movie that also used the upsetting creature designs of Swizz artist H.R. Giger to put a deeply disturbing spin on sexual imagery.
However, I remember that when the film was film was released, there was a certain amount of disappointment that the movie chose to ditch a lot of its themes in favour of dumbing everything down and playing to the lowest common denominator (eg. boobs).
But after an overdue rewatch, has the more thoughtful parts of Species managed to mature with the times, or is the film still mostly mindlessly obsessed with the act of getting laid just as much as it’s shapely antagonist is?

After receiving a response from an other worldly presence, the boffins at S.E.T.I. (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) took the info they received that detailed how to splice alien DNA with humans and decided to take it out for a whirl in an event we’ll call mistake number 1. The result is Sil, a human/alien hybrid that aged to look about twelve years old in three months, however, after it was noticed that she was showing violent traits while dreaming, project leader Xavier Fitch was reluctantly persuaded to terminate the experiment with liberal doses of cyanide gas. Mistake number 2. Before you know it, Sil has broken out and gone on the run while displaying survival instincts far beyond her mere three months of existence and Finch scrambles to assemble a team to catch and kill the wayward alien before she manages to do some major damage.
Finch wrangles squinting black ops merc Preston Lennox, molecular biologist Dr. Laura Baker, anthropologist Dr. Stephen Arden and – as a wild card – twitchy empath Dan Smithson together to get on Sil’s trail, but soon the group discovers that their mission is a going be a little bit more challenging than running down an alien pre-teen. After getting swallowed up by a gooey cocoon that is produced by her own body, Sil emerges as a shapely twenty-something woman who is all blonde hair, all superlative bone structure and a complete slave to her life cycle which is urging her to mate as quick as possible so she can go forth and multiply. Of course, if Sil manages to drop an alien sprog that’s male, it could spell disaster for the human race once that comes of age and starts impregnating hosts left, right and centre. Now on a mission to save humanity, the team starts to close the gap between them and their sexually voracious quarry, but while Sil is being pushed by her reproductive organs, that doesn’t mean that she isn’t fiercely intelligent and incredibly dangerous.

When rewatching Species, it’s constantly amazing how such a willfully stupid film could be so radically ahead of its time. While later films, such as Jonathan Glazer’s Under The Skin and Vincenzo Natali’s Splice tackled similar themes as sexual politics, aliens and scientists fucking around with the natural order of things in a way that was far more cerebral than having Michael Madsen say things like “he’s about to copulate with a creature from outer space”, Species stumbled upon these themes first and if it had been delivered by a surer hand, we might have had something of a sci-fi schlocker that actually had something smart to say. It’s not that director Roger Donaldson hasn’t got the goods to mount a handsome looking production while dealing with an unstoppable, inhuman force that won’t stop until it gets what it wants (he worked with Tom Cruise on Cocktail), but even though he’s tackled complex sexual relationships in the likes of No Way Out, there’s a feeling that a lot of Species’ sharper edges were dulled on its journey to the screen.
There’s still some social commentary about the battlefield between the sexes and it touches on some of the hazards that women have to watch for in modern dating when Sil has a run in with a more predatory male who has no idea what he’s messing with. But while a more modern film might use the whole #metoo movement to make Sil a creep slaughtering, anti-hero, alien, girlboss – Species solidly maintains that Natasha Henstridge’s striking character is very much the villain despite displaying a ton of highly relatable behavior. However, whether it’s ripping the spine out of the drunk girl in a bar who tries to steal a man, or ramming her razor sharp tongue through the skull of a potential rapist, a lot of Sil’s on screen threat is constantly diluted by the movie making her an overtly sexual object despite the fact that she’s supposed to be something to fear. In fact, I distinctly remember when it first came out seeing it with a friend and turning round midway through the screening to find the rest of the cinema was full of single, middle-aged dudes who all seemed to be part of the dirty mac brigade; obviously this was far creepier than anything that unfolded on screen.

It’s not only Donaldson who is selling his concept short as the ensemble here – while pretty stacked – is solidly locked into B-Movie mode as they deliver their lines with a mock seriousness that feels like everyone is about to piss themselves laughing the second the director call cut. The Oscar winning Ben Kingsley spend the entire film being one of the dumbest scientist in cinema history as he puts on a voice that would go on to become the Mandarin in Iron Man 3 and crumbles into a buffoon at the slightest hint of pressure. Michael Madsen rasps his one liners and shares sardonic flirting with Marg Helgenberger and Alfred Molina just seems happy to be there; but it’s Forrest Whitaker who steals the show – if only for the wrong reasons – as the highly sensitive empath who may truly be one of the most unhelpful characters even seen in science fiction. When he isn’t announcing “something bad happened here” when presented with a room containing a giant, empty alien cocoon and a dead body (oh gee whizz Forrest, ya think?!), he’s milking every line within an inch of its life and he harvests the lion’s share of the unintentional laughs that arise from his scenery chewing performance. In fact, the only person trying to take this shit seriously is Henstridge who genuinely thinks she’s in with a shot to deliver a performance in line with Arnold Schwarzenegger’s The Terminator. To give her her credit, she’s not far off but you can’t help but feel that her physical attributes are allowed to overshadow her acting.

However, when it comes to Sil herself, the movie delivers some cool, Alien-esque stuff that not only gives us a nifty creature design that comes with plenty of messed up body horror such as nipples that sprout tentacles and plenty of other Giger-typical stuff. While the climax drops any lingering sense of commentary in favour of the usual sight of gloomy caverns, flashlights and flamethrowers, the 1995 CGI that replaces Steve Johnson’s nifty practical effects don’t prove to be too disastrous to diffuse the main reason that Species has managed to endure. Despite all of it’s stupid aspects, the film is actually a lot of fun to watch.
Hampered massively by a desire to dull it’s smarter aspects by being as relentlessly dumb as humanly possible, it feels Species was robbed of greatness by an urge to dumb itself down and look as pretty as it possibly can. I guess that’s something else 90s women can relate to.
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