- calendar_today August 15, 2025
She Mated, Gave Birth, and Died in the Sewer: The Species Plot
Michael Madsen, the actor behind some of the most memorable, grimy characters in modern movie history, died last week at the age of 82. Known for roles in Reservoir Dogs, Kill Bill, and Donnie Brasco, Madsen had an extensive filmography of fan-favorite, hardboiled characters. The 1995 film Species, however, is one title that doesn2 80 99t often come up in discussions about Madsen2 80 99s most iconic roles.
In this early entry in the sci-fi action franchise, Madsen played black ops mercenary Preston Lennox, one of several mercenaries sent out on a mission to hunt down and terminate a half-human, half-alien hybrid. The film, which hits its 30th anniversary this year, was a bizarre fusion of different genres at a time when both monster movies and aliens on the loose were exceedingly popular. It was also directed by Roger Donaldson, a New Zealander best known for action films like No Way Out and The Bounty. It was a little of everything, in short, and with some major creative names behind it.
Species opens with the U.S. government receiving two transmissions from outer space. The first contains a schematic for a new fuel source. The second contains detailed information about how to splice alien DNA with human DNA. You know, the government decides to do this. Led by the ruthless Dr. Xavier Fitch (Ben Kingsley), the government team injects a cell with human DNA and another with alien DNA. Their mission: to mate and, theoretically, to create a new, peaceful species. The first few months go according to plan. The human-alien hybrid develops quickly, showing all of the hallmarks of a normal human child: She crawls, she walks, she talks. They name her Sil, and they raise her in a lab in her early years (played by Michelle Williams). Fitch and his team expect her to be docile, manageable. They want to be able to control her, test her, and study her. What they don2 80 99t count on, however, is what she will become when she hits puberty.
Sil matures rapidly in the months before she disappears from the lab. By 30 months old, she looks like a young teen (Natasha Henstridge). But even Fitch can see that something is not right: She has violent nightmares, and an attack on her containment lab suggests that she may be more powerful than they initially thought. Fitch, however, has no intention of letting his creation escape. He2 80 99s had enough and orders the cyanide gas that will end the experiment to be released into the room.
The gas tube is empty, though, and when Fitch is forced to enter the containment room to get a new one, Sil escapes. Soon, Fitch and his team are on a manhunt for their creation: The force-tracking Preston Lennox (Michael Madsen), molecular biologist Dr. Laura Baker (Marg Helgenberger), the anthropologist Dr. Stephen Arden (Alfred Molina), and the empath Dan Smithson (Forest Whitaker), who has a strong, telepathic connection with Sil and can sense what she2 80 99s feeling. The chase brings them across the country and ultimately to Los Angeles, where the adult Sil (Natasha Henstridge) is on a mission of her own: to mate and multiply. Before the team can stop her, a diverse cast of bodies will pile up, from a train tramp to a nightclub victim to a doomed romantic partner. But can they stop her before she multiplies the way that the government intended?
The Making of Sil
The creature design in Species is the real selling point for the film. The task of turning author Craig Viera Feldman2 80 99s screenplay into something tangible fell to H.R. Giger, the Swiss surrealist artist best known for the xenomorph from Alien. The core of Sil2 80 99s design was very much in line with the monster design aesthetic of the 90s2 80 3designer Nathan Crowley (Titanic) made a point of emulating both Aliens and Alien in the design of the lab. She was eerie and electric: Her final form was more translucent, described in the screenplay as having 2 80 9cskin [that] resembles a glass body but with carbon inside.2 80 9d Giger had wanted to make Sil part of an alien evolutionary line, so her final form was a combination of the cocoon form she develops as she matures and a more maternal, alien form that would have been the true final form.
Despite the film2 80 99s success, Giger was unsatisfied with the film2 80 99s end product. He felt it was too similar to Alien and saw the transformation cocoon, the 2 80 9cpunching tongue,2 80 9d and the climactic birth as elements too close to the chestburster scene in Alien. Giger did, however, make one change on set: Sil had been set to die in the script when the team incinerates her with flame throwers. Giger reportedly approached executive producer Gale Anne Hurd to protest the move as being too similar to Alien 3 and Terminator 2, the latter of which also used flame throwers as the endgame for a final battle. Hurd acceded to Giger2 80 99s request and, in his place, inserted a scene where Sil is killed by a bullet to the head. The new ending was cut from the film, but, as Giger noted, his redesign was not.
Species: The Verdict
Species is almost uniformly panned by critics, with many reviews noting the flat dialogue and the underdeveloped characters. Ben Kingsley2 80 99s Fitch is one-note, and Whitaker2 80 99s empath spends much of the film lingering in the background and stating the obvious. The themes of bioethics, alien life, and maternal instinct are touched on, but never with the tenacity that audiences would have liked, and the aliens themselves, despite the design, never become a focal point of the film. However, the film is frequently discussed in critical reviews for the work of its talented costume designer, Deborah L. Scott, whose previous work in the studio world had largely been concentrated on show tunes and musical comedies.
For all that, there2 80 99s something strangely compelling about the film2 80 99s mix of science fiction and erotic horror. The source of the idea for Species, Feldman himself, had been inspired by an article by Arthur C. Clarke in which the author wrote about the theoretical improbability of extraterrestrials visiting Earth, due to the technical limitations of faster-than-light travel. He wondered, Feldman wrote, what if instead of using teleportation or spaceships, these alien beings were in contact with Earth already? What if they had sent us a blueprint, rather than a vessel? What if these blueprints were for an invasive new organism, a sentient species created using the DNA of human beings?
Species would be the hybrid version of those questions: part cautionary tale, part pure creature feature. It will never rank among the best films of the 1990s or in the same pantheon as other alien thrillers such as Alien or The Terminator, but it remains a cult classic for a reason. Henstridge2 80 99s off-kilter performance, Giger2 80 99s unsettling design, and Madsen2 80 99s grizzled, no-nonsense approach to his character keep the film afloat even when it threatens to sink. Three decades later, Species is a capsule of what science fiction looked like before big special effects replaced big ideas, and it also serves as a reminder of the films and performances that defined an actor like Michael Madsen.
