When Giger Tried to Top the Xenomorph (and Failed)

A few weeks ago, Hollywood lost one of its most recognizable character actors with the passing of Michael Madsen, who may be best remembered for his roles in crime thrillers Reservoir Dogs and Donnie Brasco, and director Quentin Tarantino’s signature splatter epics Kill Bill. While Madsen’s filmography is an absolute treasure trove of cult favorite films, few pieces have acknowledged one of his less-referenced roles, playing a black ops mercenary as part of a team tasked to hunt down a half-alien hybrid in the 1995 sci-fi creature feature Species. In a year where the movie turns 30, it’s about time we take another look at the monster movie, remembered now more for the roles it spawned for Michelle Williams and Natasha Henstridge than for any of its leading men.

The film was the second feature from No Way Out director Roger Donaldson. A loose combination of horror, thriller, and soft sci-fi, Species was notable in an era already flush with alien-invasion flicks and monster-movie mayhem for its creative gamble. The story begins with the U.S. government receiving two transmissions from outer space. The first details a breakthrough fuel source that has the potential to replace fossil fuels. The second is a set of coded instructions on how to splice alien DNA with human DNA. As you might expect, the government takes the bait. Leading a team of scientists, Dr. Xavier Fitch (Ben Kingsley) begins work on a new hybrid organism, Sil. In her early years, she was played by Michelle Williams, an unknown at the time, then just 19 years old. The experiment is a resounding success in that it produces a functioning organism, but where the scientists expected a compliant, docile product, Sil is something far more dangerous.

Sil is a quick learner, developing at a rate much higher than human children. After only three months of life, she looks like a 12-year-old. But something seems off. She has violent nightmares, and slowly, almost accidentally, she and her handlers find evidence that she may not be as “safe” or “controllable” as Fitch and the other scientists believe. When Fitch decides to abort the experiment and release cyanide gas into her containment cell to kill her, Sil breaks free of her cage, putting the film’s plot into motion.

To track her down, Fitch recruits a team of specialists that includes Madsen’s Preston Lennox, a black ops mercenary with little patience for bureaucracy or excessive scientific jargon; Dr. Laura Baker (Marg Helgenberger), a molecular biologist who specializes in epigenetics; Dr. Stephen Arden (Alfred Molina), a cultural anthropologist; and Dan Smithson (Forest Whitaker), a brooding empath who can sense what Sil is thinking and feeling. The team tracks Sil to the jungles of Central America, then up the East Coast to Los Angeles, where she’s gone feral to locate a human mate and reproduce. She’s resourceful, fast-learning, and most of all, incredibly instinct-driven. She kills for food and pleasure and seems to have an innate understanding of the ways of humanity. As bodies begin to pile up, including a train tramp, a stripper, and eventually an unwitting lover, the team has to act fast to prevent her from reproducing, which could happen even faster.

The design of Sil was another of the film’s standout elements. Created by legendary surrealist artist H.R. Giger, the creature that went from a cluster of cells to the mischievous teenager played by Michelle Williams in the first act to the grown, formidable alien played by Natasha Henstridge in the film’s second half was something straight out of Giger’s signature biomorphic dreamscape. Sil’s final design was meant to “look like a glass body but with the carbon inside,” and her entire aesthetic was meant to be sensual, sexual, and deadly. Giger initially created an evolutionary map for Sil that would see her progress through multiple alien-human stages as the story progressed, but the production was forced to scale back that concept to a transformation cocoon and the climactic giant maternal alien form.

While the film was a commercial success and remains a visual staple in creature feature production design, Giger was less than thrilled with the finished product. The artist felt like Species cribbed too hard from his Alien work, particularly in the creation of Sil’s “punching tongue” and, most of all, the infamous scene where Sil gives birth to an army of bugs in the film’s finale, which he saw as a less-subtle copy of the famous “chestburster” scene in Alien. Giger even directly intervened in the production to make sure that Sil was killed with a bullet to the head rather than by flames from a flame-thrower (also an Alien touchpoint, he said, as well as Terminator 2).

Species, for all its promise and visual splendor, was never a critical darling. The dialogue was bland, the supporting cast underwritten. Kingsley was straight-up terrible as the film’s loose villain, and Whitaker’s empath mostly just sat around stating the obvious. The movie had fascinating thematic tendrils, but they mostly hung in the air unsolved or unaddressed. It touched on bioethics and advanced science, on the power of alien contact, on instinct and maternal urges. Screenwriter Feldman was partially inspired by an Arthur C. Clarke article that posited a reason why there’d never be any sign of aliens visiting Earth, because faster-than-light travel might be so improbable that aliens might never make it here. But what if, Feldman asked, the extraterrestrials were instead trying to contact Earth, not with a signal or with a physical craft, but with blueprints and instructions on how to build something organic and self-contained, something like a sentient species cobbled together from Earth’s DNA?

Species, in other words, was both a cautionary tale and a creature feature for the ages. It may never sit at the same table with Alien or the Terminator films, but it’s earned its cult status for good reason. Between Henstridge’s otherworldly performance and charisma, Madsen’s tough-guy bluster, and Giger’s equally horrifying and beautiful design work, the 1995 film holds up as a piece of mid-to-late 1990s sci-fi with a lot of style and style all its own.

Species is a reminder, three decades later, of what science fiction looked like when style could outshine substance—and what a little bit of style can do for an underappreciated actor like Michael Madsen.