Michelle Williams’ Alien Debut in Species

Last month, Hollywood was shaken by the passing of actor Michael Madsen, a fixture of the action movie landscape who’s best known for his tough-guy turns in Reservoir Dogs, Kill Bill, and Donnie Brasco. His filmography is rich with fan-favorite roles, and while plenty of retrospectives have honored Madsen’s legacy, few have remembered that he once starred in one of the weirdest and most ambitious ‘90s genre movies: 1995’s Species, as a black ops mercenary tasked with killing a half-human, half-alien hybrid. And this year marks the film’s 30th anniversary.

Directed by Roger Donaldson (No Way Out, The Bounty) and based on a story by screenwriter Robert Feldman (Demolition Man, Intruder), Species was a weird hybrid of action, horror, and soft science fiction itself. The film begins with the United States government receiving two transmissions from outer space: one a detailed set of instructions on a revolutionary fuel source, and another set of instructions for how to splice human DNA with alien DNA. The government proceeds, naturally. Led by Dr. Xavier Fitch (Ben Kingsley), scientists create a human/alien hybrid named Sil. In her younger years, she was played by Michelle Williams. The intention was to create a docile, controllable organism that would only act as a passive host for an alien virus. What they created instead was a monster.

Sil develops at an alarming rate. Within three months, she’s the physical equivalent of a 12-year-old girl, but something’s not right: she has violent nightmares, and other signs begin to point to Sil being anything but “controllable.” When Fitch decides to end the experiment by releasing cyanide into her containment cell, Sil manages to escape. Fitch assembles a team of experts that includes Madsen’s Preston Lennox, a rough-and-tumble mercenary; Dr. Laura Baker (Marg Helgenberger), a molecular biologist; Dr. Stephen Arden (Alfred Molina), an anthropologist; and Dan Smithson (Forest Whitaker), a sensitive empath who can feel what Sil is feeling. The team will chase Sil across the country and eventually to Los Angeles, where a now-grown-up Sil, played by Natasha Henstridge, will begin her quest to find a mate and reproduce. As is typical for any young adult, Sil is smart, resourceful, and ruled by primal instinct. The team will attempt to catch up with her before she has the chance to create more of her kind, which could happen in as short a time as 72 hours.

Designing a Monster for Species

Arguably, the most iconic part of Species was the monster itself, designed by legendary surrealist artist H.R. Giger, most famous for designing the xenomorph and the look of Ridley Scott’s Alien. Giger, working off a description by Feldman, was charged with making Sil “an aesthetic warrior, also sensual and deadly.” The final design was both bizarre and sensual: in her final form, Sil has translucent skin that was described as a “glass body but with carbon inside.” Giger had wanted to include multiple stages of alien/human evolution for Sil, but production realities prevented it, with Giger only including a transformation cocoon and a final maternal alien body.

Giger would later state that he was disappointed in the final product, feeling that Species too closely resembled Alien, particularly with the “punching tongue” and a climactic birth scene that he felt was derivative of Alien’s “chestburster” scene. He went so far as to visit the set during production to demand that Sil ultimately be killed by a bullet to the head rather than set ablaze, a move he said was too reminiscent of both Alien 3 and Terminator 2: Judgement Day.

Species was not a Critical Hit, but IIta a Diverting Watch

Species was not a hit with the critics, many of whom described the dialogue as stilted and the characters as one-dimensional. Kingsley’s Fitch is amoral and not quite fully realized, and Whitaker’s empath mostly serves to hang around in the dark, repeatedly stating the obvious. The bioethics of genetic tampering, the psychological and scientific effects of alien contact, the power of maternal instinct: all these elements were suggested, but never given time to fully come to life. Despite its faults, Species remains a weirdly compelling film. For one, Feldman himself was inspired in part by an article written by Arthur C. Clarke that postulated that aliens had likely never and would never contact humans due to the physical improbability of faster-than-light travel. What if, Feldman wondered, aliens made contact with Earth but using blueprints to create something organic instead of technological: an invasive, sentient species built from Earth’s DNA?

Species ended up being both a cautionary tale and a creature feature, though it never had the stomach for the ideas it presented. The film will likely never be remembered in the same light as classics like Alien or The Terminator, but it found a cult audience, and for good reason. Between Henstridge’s captivating performance as Sil, Madsen’s weathered grit, and Giger’s unforgettable monster design, Species endures as a ‘90s science fiction curio—and a reminder that Hollywood in the ‘90s was an unpredictable place.