Cocoon, Train, Club, Sewer: Species by the Body Count

Michael Madsen died earlier this month, leaving Hollywood to mourn one of the grittier, more indelible actors of modern cinema. Most obituaries have focused on his work in Reservoir Dogs, Kill Bill, and Donnie Brasco, while his long filmography includes more than its share of offbeat fan favorites. In honor of the actor’s memory and the odd, but enduring nature of those choices, let’s remember one of Madsen’s more bizarre roles: that of black ops mercenary on the hunt for a half-human, half-alien hybrid in the 1995 sci-fi thriller Species.

As the film turns 30 years old in 2023, it’s time to dig it up from the grave and examine what has become an unexpectedly enduring creature feature. It’s always fun to look back on movies from yesteryear, but as the modern landscape has shifted, Species and its original run on the big screen stand out as a fascinating snapshot of an earlier era. In the ’90s, creature features were everywhere, and aliens were a source of both fascination and paranoia, and this strange blend of giallo and space horror could have been a blockbuster cash grab—instead, it tried to have a few fun, creative ideas of its own.

Species: A Brief Plot Synopsis

Species, directed by Roger Donaldson (No Way Out, The Bounty) and written by screenwriter Jim Loach, had plenty of ’90s sleaze going for it from the start. When the U.S. government receives two transmissions from space—a detailed schematic on an advanced fuel source and precise, step-by-step instructions on how to splice alien and human DNA together—of course, they follow through. Under the supervision of Dr. Xavier Fitch (Ben Kingsley), Sil is born: a hybrid with the DNA of an unknown alien organism fused with that of a human woman.

Played by Michelle Williams in her early years, Sil was supposed to be a docile, compliant organism, easily controlled and studied in her lab environment. Instead, what the team creates is an aggressive, feral chimera. Sil quickly reaches the age of a 12-year-old in mere months and begins to have violent nightmares. As Dr. Laura Baker (Marg Helgenberger) and Dr. Stephen Arden (Alfred Molina) watch her closely, subtle hints that Sil is not as “compliant” as they hoped begin to appear. When Fitch decides to bring her experiment to an end by releasing cyanide into her cell, Sil fights back and escapes the lab.

To find Sil, Fitch enlists a team of specialists to track her down across the country, led by Madsen’s Preston Lennox, a hard-nosed mercenary; Dr. Laura Baker (Helgenberger), a molecular biologist; Dr. Stephen Arden (Alfred Molina), an anthropologist; and Dan Smithson (Forest Whitaker), a brooding, mysterious empath who can feel what Sil is feeling. Tracking her movements to Los Angeles, Fitch and his team follow as Sil, now fully-grown and played by Natasha Henstridge, is on the hunt to reproduce and bring a race of these new organisms to life.

Sil is street smart, cunning, and completely ruled by primal instinct. Intuitive, adaptive, and utterly beautiful, Sil manages to seduce, kill, and eventually replicate herself in a string of murders across Los Angeles that include a train tramp, a nightclub victim, and an eventual lover whom the team is helpless to save. But there’s only so much time before her DNA goes critical: if Sil can reproduce herself, her offspring can be equally as fast and efficient.

Meet the Alien Hybrid Monster: Sil

Species’ most instantly iconic component is its titular monster, a half-alien, half-human hybrid called Sil. The creature was designed by H.R. Giger, the legendary surrealist artist best known for his iconic work on the design of the xenomorph alien from Alien. Giger set out to make Sil “an aesthetic warrior, also sensual and deadly.” The initial design was based on traditional Japanese flower patterns combined with the “raku ware” style of pottery, which was then used to craft Sil’s final form.

Sil was to have translucent skin, a “glass body but with carbon inside,” as Giger called it, which allowed her inner organs to be visible through her skin. Giger would have originally preferred to have Sil go through several stages of alien evolution throughout the film, but the production was limited to just a transformation cocoon and her fully-matured, maternal alien body used in the film’s climax.

Species was a commercial success, but not without some critical disappointment from the artist himself. In particular, Giger thought the film was a “rip-off” of his own previous Alien work, with Species using the same “punching tongue” and featuring the same kind of famous birth scene in which Sil “emerges” from her lover’s chest at the end. (Giger had to hold back production, demanding Sil be killed by a bullet to the head in the film’s climax instead of the flame-throwers he was originally shown, which he said “imitated the chest-bursting Alien 3 and Terminator 2 movies too closely.”)

Species: Ending, Themes, and a Look Ahead

Species was not a great movie, but it was ambitious and had a certain unique appeal. The dialogue is stale, and many of the characters are painfully thin (Marg Helgenberger’s doctor exists mostly to say, “Women!”), And Kingsley’s villain, Fitch, is an amoral tool with no real arc or goal beyond what’s shown on screen. The themes about bioethics, first contact, and maternal instinct are touched on but not thoroughly examined. For all its adventurousness, the film is sometimes shallow and relies on its mysteries rather than developing its intrigue.

This begs the question: why the hell did we care at all? The screenwriter Jim Loach based the concept on an Arthur C. Clarke article that made the case that we’d likely never be visited by extraterrestrials in our lifetimes, since it was so difficult to travel faster than the speed of light. What if, Loach wondered, instead of flying saucers and laser guns, aliens made contact with Earth and transmitted blueprints on how to build an organic life form right here on Earth? What if those aliens, for purposes that could only be instinctual, sent instructions for building a single, sentient, fully-functional organism out of Earth’s DNA?

Species turns 30 years old in 2023, which means it’s a perfect excuse to revisit this cult favorite. A monster that’s an alien organism designed to seduce and kill has all the campy appeal of a guillotine blade running through Nicole Kidman’s face. Between Natasha Henstridge’s iconic performance, Michael Madsen’s “been there, done that” swagger, and the design work of H.R. Giger, Species is a ’90s sci-fi curiosity that only gets better with age.