Remembering Species: The ’90s Sci-Fi Thriller That Tried.

Hollywood actor Michael Madsen died earlier this month. His last words: “Great job, everyone, it’s been a wonderful show.” The words were an apparent homage to Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs, the 1992 crime film that made him a cult actor with a signature style. His performance as the laconic, tattooed killer Mr. Blonde would be his last performance in a film, but his career after Dogs saw him take roles in other fan-favorites like Kill Bill, Donnie Brasco, and Boogie Nights.

Fans and critics have noted many of these over the past few weeks, but few have revisited Madsen in a more unusual performance—playing a black ops mercenary in the alien hybrid thriller Species, a film he shot in 1995. The film, which turns 30 this year, is worth remembering for many reasons, but most of all for being a risk-taking piece of genre filmmaking at a time when studios were churning out both monster movies and alien paranoia in spades.

Species at 30: Odd Mix of Horror and Sci-Fi

Species was directed by Roger Donaldson (No Way Out, The Bounty), and it bore a familiar pedigree for 1990s alien-invasion movies, harkening back to Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Terminator, and even Alphaville. The film follows a group of investigators tracking a hybrid alien-human created by the US government. The story begins with two signals received from outer space. One is a message containing the specs of a powerful new fuel source, and the other contains coded instructions on how to splice alien DNA with human DNA. Predictably, the government acts on that second message.

Under the watchful eye of Dr. Xavier Fitch (Ben Kingsley), a hybrid is born. She’s called Sil (played in her younger years by Michelle Williams), and in theory, the process is supposed to produce a benign, controllable organism. It doesn’t. Sil grows quickly, acquiring the body of a 12-year-old in only three months. But her development is erratic. She has violent nightmares, and before long, signs emerge that Sil may not be as controllable as Fitch thought. When the doctor decides to kill her by pumping cyanide into her holding tank, Sil finds a way out—and the pursuit is on.

Tracking the creature involves a team of specialists, including Madsen as Preston Lennox, a hard-boiled mercenary with the job of neutralizing the alien, Dr. Laura Baker (Marg Helgenberger), a molecular biologist, Dr. Stephen Arden (Alfred Molina), an anthropologist, and Dan Smithson (Forest Whitaker), a moody empath who can sense Sil’s feelings. The team travels the country to find Sil, and ultimately to Los Angeles, where she’s found mating and producing a child. Now fully-grown (and played by Natasha Henstridge), Sil is smart, resourceful, and programmed to kill. If she reproduces, the team will have no choice but to stop her from breeding more of her kind, as she reproduces faster than they can kill her.

One of the most iconic and enduring design elements in the film was the creature itself. Sil was the brainchild of visionary surrealist artist H.R. Giger, who was best known for his work on the xenomorph creature in Alien. Giger’s concept for Sil was, in his own words, “an aesthetic warrior, also sensual and deadly.” Her later form, as a near-human adult, has skin that is translucent. Giger and the filmmakers described it as “a glass body but with carbon inside.” The evolution of Sil through her life stages was an ambitious process that Giger originally had multiple alien evolutions and designs for, but had to be scaled back due to time and budget, and Giger opted for a transformation cocoon and the climactic, maternal alien body we all remember.

Giger was a fan of the film when he was hired and conceptualized it. But he also thought it fell too much into an “Alien imitation” trap and that it too closely mirrored the first film. He pointed to the “punching tongue” in Sil’s head (look it up), which he saw as a direct lift of the alien’s “chestburster” attack in Ridley Scott’s film. He also came on set during filming to make sure Sil was killed with a bullet to the head and not some flame throwers that he said mirrored Alien 3 and Terminator 2 too closely.

Species‘ biggest flaws were the clunky dialogue, the underdeveloped characters, and the missed opportunities to comment on the bioethics of the work, the experience of alien contact, and the complex maternal instincts that drive both Sil and Dr. Fitch. Kingsley’s Fitch was one-dimensional and amoral, and Whitaker’s empath exists mostly to telegraph the emotions onscreen as the rest of the cast blunders into increasingly grisly scenes.

Species as a Genre Melting Pot of Concepts

Screenwriter Feldman took inspiration for the story from a 1973 article by science fiction great Arthur C. Clarke in which he postulated that extraterrestrial beings would not visit Earth because the technology necessary to cross such distances faster than light made it nearly impossible. What if, Feldman asked, an advanced alien civilization instead sought out contact with Earth and sent not an object or even a transmission but something more organic? In a case of reverse engineering, what if they sent a living alien blueprint that could mutate and adapt to Earth? Feldman’s idea was fertile ground, and the final product was a film that was at times a cautionary tale, a creature feature, and even a soft science fiction drama.

Species never quite managed to reach the heights of its better-known influences, and it will likely never hold its own against Alien or The Terminator. But in the right circumstances, it’s worth checking out, if only to relive Henstridge’s turn as an alien born from our DNA, Madsen’s gravelly turn as Preston Lennox, and the incredible, unearthly work of H.R. Giger, who died two years after the film’s release.

Species turned 30 last year and, looking back three decades later, remains a time capsule of 1990s science fiction filmmaking—and of the kinds of weird and unexpected roles that can make even the most iconic of movie actors keep turning up, even long after they’re gone.