- calendar_today August 15, 2025
What Giger Got Right (and Wrong) in Species
The week before last, Hollywood lost another one of its favorite tattooed tough guys. Actor Michael Madsen, who will be forever remembered for his standout roles in Reservoir Dogs, Kill Bill, and Donnie Brasco, passed away earlier this month. Fans have been posting tributes and talking about their favorite Madsen performances on social media, but few are talking about one of his more peculiar roles 26mdash;that of a black ops mercenary tracking down a half-alien/half-human killing machine in 1995 26rsquo;s sci-fi horror classic Species. As the film turns 30 years old this year, we thought it would be a good time to take a look back at a fun, gory, often ridiculous action monster film.
Released just two years after Independence Day, and another three years after Jurassic Park, the mid- 26rsquo;90s were a heyday of creature features and alien-invasion flicks. Species, directed by Roger Donaldson (No Way Out, The Bounty), was an unlikely mix of horror, action, and soft science fiction. Two transmissions are received from outer space: one contains information about a new form of fuel; the other provides specific instructions for splicing alien DNA and human DNA. Naturally, the government listens to both. Under the leadership of Dr. Xavier Fitch (Ben Kingsley), one hybrid is created: Sil, a.k.a. Michelle Williams in her early years. The hope was that the creature would be a controllable, domesticated organism. What they created was a ticking time bomb.
Sil grows at an alarming rate: within three months, she has the appearance of a 12-year-old girl. She also exhibits some odd behavior. She has violent nightmares, and evidence begins to mount that she may not be as 26ldquo;tameable 26rdquo; as the government scientists hope. When Fitch decides to kill the experiment by releasing cyanide gas into her holding tank, Sil kills the guard and escapes, thus launching the hunt.
To catch the girl, Fitch has put together a team of experts to study, track, and 26mdash;finally 26mdash;terminate Sil. They include Madsen as Preston Lennox, the no-nonsense mercenary; molecular biologist Dr. Laura Baker (Marg Helgenberger); Dr. Stephen Arden (Alfred Molina), an anthropologist; and Dan Smithson (Forest Whitaker), a sensitive, black-clad empath who 26ldquo;reads 26rdquo; Sil 26rsquo;s thoughts and emotions. The team travels across the country and eventually to Los Angeles, where Sil, now fully grown (Natasha Henstridge), hunts for human blood to reproduce. She 26rsquo;s smart and cunning; in the wild, she can be quick and agile; she has a primal intelligence. As Sil 26rsquo;s trail of bodies mounts (including a train tramp, a nightclub hooker, and, eventually, a hapless boyfriend), the team follows, desperate to catch her before she has a chance to reproduce. And in true 26rsquo;90s horror/sci-fi style, her offspring will be able to multiply in the blink of an eye.
A Beautiful Kill
Much of Species 26lsquo; success as a horror/sci-fi movie was in the creature design. Legendary surrealist artist H.R. Giger designed Sil to be 26ldquo;a powerful, highly sensual and yet deadly organic 26ndash;mechanical killing machine. 26rdquo; Giger 26rsquo;s influence on 20th-century pop culture and genre filmmaking can hardly be overstated. Best known for designing the xenomorph in Alien, Giger was inspired to 26ldquo;move away from the ugly 26rdquo; when designing Sil. He 26ldquo;wanted to go in the opposite direction, 26rdquo; which resulted in the creature 26rsquo;s final form being what he described as 26ldquo;a glass body but with a carbon inside. 26rdquo;
Originally, Giger had intended to design a multi-stage alien evolution for Sil, complete with a cocoon-like transformation and climactic maternal alien body, but production issues forced him to scale back his work. The cocoon/transformation was used, but Giger couldn 26rsquo;t complete the alien mothership 26rsquo;s design in time for the shoot, so it was replaced by a practical-looking liquid silver latex creature, its teeth and claws a matte black.
Giger wasn 26rsquo;t pleased with Species, feeling the movie too closely resembled Alien in both creature design and key plot points. Alien, he said, was 26ldquo;a much deeper, more pessimistic film. 26rdquo; The production crew and screenwriter David Self (who based his script on a book of the same name by Anne Rice 26rsquo;s stepson, son-of-an-H.R.-Giger-pal Giger pal) had paid too much homage to Alien, from the 26ldquo;punching tongue 26rdquo; to the finale birth scene, which he saw as a regurgitation of the chestburster moment in Alien. Giger even went to the producers during production to demand that Sil die by bullet to the head rather than be blasted with flame-throwers by the end of the movie, saying it was too much like Alien 3 and Terminator 2 combined.
Species, for all its creative aspirations, was not a critical darling. Dialogue was often clumsy, and many of the characters were woefully underwritten. Kingsley 26rsquo;s Xavier Fitch is both amoral and not very convincing; Whitaker 26rsquo;s empath is mostly relegated to the background, spouting vague pronouncements. Sil 26rsquo;s childlike desire to create a family and reproduce; the need to mate and propagate species; the fear of corporate government overreach; contact with aliens and what that might mean for human beings 26mdash;there are touches of each of these and many other themes, but Species never quite goes there. It 26rsquo;s much more content to rest in its shallow, sci-fi/weird pornography groove.
There is something irresistible, however, about the movie 26rsquo;s sometimes clunky pastiche of science fiction, erotophobia, and (forgive me, but) E.T. going to grade school. Feldman, the screenwriter, was influenced in part by an article by Arthur C. Clarke that suggested that extraterrestrial life forms would likely never visit Earth because of the vastness of space and how unlikely it would be to find faster-than-light travel. But what if, Feldman wondered, aliens were able to make contact with Earth through blueprints? A design for a replicating, living organism. A weapon of war made out of a combination of Earth DNA and alien DNA.
Species, then, became not just a cautionary tale about the ethics of reproductive science and the militarization of that research; it was also a winking acknowledgment that maybe, instead of coming from the stars, Species might be created right here on Earth. Alien, it might not have been, but Species has carved out its cult following all the same, and not without reason. Henstridge 26rsquo;s weirdly alluring take on Sil, Madsen 26rsquo;s unexpectedly affecting turn as a spurned scientist and hard-bitten killer, and Giger 26rsquo;s unforgettable creature design all add up to one hell of a 26rsquo;90s sci-fi trash oddity that 26rsquo;s well worth a revisit.
Species is available on Blu-ray from Amazon and Vudu. Check your local listings to see if it 26rsquo;s streaming on a channel near you.
