Earlier this month, Hollywood mourned the passing of Michael Madsen, a gifted actor best known for his critically acclaimed roles in Reservoir Dogs, Kill Bill, and Donnie Brasco, among others. Few obituaries have mentioned one of his lesser-known roles: a black ops mercenary hired to help hunt down an escaped human/alien hybrid in 1995’s Species. The sci-fi thriller turns 30 this year, and while it garnered decidedly mixed reviews upon release, the film holds up quite well as a not-quite-campy B monster movie that makes for a great guilty pleasure.
(Many spoilers below.)
Screenwriter Dennis Feldman (The Golden Child) was partially inspired by an Arthur C. Clarke article discussing how the odds were slim that an extraterrestrial craft would ever visit Earth, given the great distances that would need to be traversed (assuming that traveling faster than the speed of light would be highly unlikely). Feldman was intrigued by the prospect of making extraterrestrial contact via information— specifically, alien instructions on how to build an instrument that could talk to terrestrial humans.
That instrument wouldn’t be mechanical but organic, enabling an extraterrestrial visitor to adapt to Earth via combined DNA. Furthermore, rather than viewing projects like SETI or the Voyager missions—both of which sent transmissions containing information about Earth—as positive, Feldman considered them potentially dangerous, essentially inviting predators to target Earth’s inhabitants. His alien would be a kind of bioweapon. The result was Species, which began as a spec script that eventually attracted the interest of MGM and director Roger Donaldson (The Bounty, No Way Out).
The premise is that the US government receives a response to the transmissions set into space: One message gives instructions on a new fuel source; the other contains explicit instructions on how to create an alien DNA sample and splice it with that of a human. Dr. Xavier Fitch (Ben Kingsley) is the scientist in charge of conducting the latter experiment, and the result is Sil (played as a young girl by Michelle Williams), a female alien/human hybrid they believed would have “docile and controllable” traits.
