Species (1995) Review

Species (1995) Review

Species is about alien DNA being implanted into a human embryo in a lab, which grows into a young girl and escapes, prompting the government to assemble a team to hunt her down before she copulates with a man and begins taking over the planet. The concept is pretty original, but unfortunately, the execution leaves a lot to be desired. 

The main team is played by some pretty great actors, but either they phoned in their performances or the director didn’t know how to direct them. Ben Kingsley and Michael Madsen actually look and sound bored pretty much the entire time, and they had been in some incredible films prior to this. The characters are all stock, with the exception of Forest Whitaker’s character, who is an empath, which means he can sense people’s emotions. It doesn’t really amount to much, though; he just spouts other people’s feelings back at them and acts sad most of the time. 

The lab-born alien-human hybrid, which they call Sil, takes on an adult form, played by Natasha Henstridge. She escapes on a train and makes a cocoon, which is sort of derivative of Alien, but the similarities don’t stop there. Occasionally, Sil takes on a monstrous form, but it’s only shown in glimpses and mostly saved for the finale. The creature looks like a female version of the xenomorph, which is no coincidence, given it was designed by Alien designer H.R. Giger. It’s not a bad design, though, and she has some impressive moves, like tit-tentacles that shoot out from her nipples and grab people. That brings me to what most people probably remember when thinking back on Species: the nudity. 

Surprisingly, there isn’t that much blood and gore, but did they ever deliver in the T&A department. Poor Natasha Henstridge is topless for a large portion of this movie. Even though Sil is growing and learning at an exponential rate, she doesn’t have much of a vocabulary or range of emotion, so Ms. Henstridge is clearly here just for visual appeal—and this was her big-screen debut. It seems like they tried to take the concept seriously, but it just ended up becoming a trashy B-grade sci-fi bout.  

Species had the potential to be great, but didn’t quite get there. The practical effects are good when shown (which is unfortunately not that much), but the cgi is terrible even for the mid-nineties. There’s just enough intrigue and weird alien schlock to keep it going. I think of Species as fitting in with the alien movie trend of the time. There was Alien Resurrection, The Fifth Element, Independence Day, and this, perhaps the cheapest, sleaziest, and schlockiest of them all.