Giger’s Discontent: Why He Was Unhappy with Species

Earlier this month, actor Michael Madsen passed away. He will likely be remembered for such seminal film roles as in Reservoir Dogs, Kill Bill, and Donnie Brasco, among his numerous roles as a hardened villain in everything from Boyz N the Hood to Django Unchained. One role that few may remember is Madsen in 1995’s Species, a madcap thriller about a black ops mercenary tasked with hunting down a half-human, half-alien “hybrid.” It’s a role that has flown under the radar for Madsen, but is worth revisiting, especially as Species itself turns 30 this year.

Species wasn’t one of the more remarkable entries in the Hollywood ’90s monster-movie boom. Or at least not at first. Directed by Roger Donaldson (No Way Out, The Bounty), the movie was a bizarre blend of gritty science fiction, horror, and soft sci-fi action. Its hook was easy: What if the U.S. government received two transmissions from outer space, one that detailed a new form of fuel and another that contained explicit instructions on how to splice alien DNA with human DNA? Naturally, they go for it. A molecular biologist (Marg Helgenberger) and a hotshot government anthropologist (Alfred Molina) pair up with a mysterious security officer named Preston Lennox (Michael Madsen) to track down the creature.

The “experiment” is simple: Splice a human female fetus with alien DNA to create a hybrid, which is then raised by a team of scientific doctors and technicians led by Dr. Xavier Fitch (Ben Kingsley). The idea is to develop a controllable, docile organic weapon. But something’s off. The human half of the hybrid, a young girl named Sil, matures at an accelerated rate, reaching the physical maturity of a 12-year-old girl in just three months. She has violent nightmares, an obsession with harming flies, and shows little to no regard for the people around her.

When Fitch decides to terminate the experiment and floods her containment cell with cyanide, Sil breaks free and escapes. Fitch calls in reinforcements, enlisting Madsen’s Preston Lennox, a no-nonsense mercenary with a license to kill, to help stop Sil. They team up with Helgenberger’s molecular biologist, Molina’s anthropologist, and a shadowy empath named Dan Smithson (Forest Whitaker) who can sense what Sil is feeling. The team chases her across the country to Los Angeles, where she’s become a woman (Natasha Henstridge). There, Sil begins to hunt and kill to find a mate and reproduce. A hyper-intelligent, highly evolved mutation, Sil is just as instinctive as she is sophisticated. As people fall victim to her quest—including a train tramp, a nightclub patron and, of course, a boyfriend—the team scrambles to stop her before she can create a new, exponentially growing army.

No Human Being Can Resist Her

One of the most interesting elements of the 1995 movie was the alien. Sil, the human-alien hybrid, was the work of legendary surrealist artist H.R. Giger, whose most famous gig in Hollywood was as the designer of the alien species from Alien. Giger was a big fan of biomechanics and incorporated many of his otherworldly aesthetics into the creation of Sil. Giger wanted the final version of Sil to be an “aesthetic warrior, also sensual and deadly.” He described the final version of Sil as a work of “liquid art.” Sil’s final, physical form after transformation was described by Giger as, “A transparent body but with carbon inside. It is like a glass body but with carbon inside. To me, that is a new style of painting, but applied to sculpture.”

Giger originally designed several stages of alien-human evolution for Sil. But production restraints forced Giger to cut back on the number of Sils. He was left to design a brief transformation cocoon stage and a final maternal alien body.

Giger was reportedly less than pleased with the final product, in no small part because it bore a striking resemblance to his previous work on Alien. Giger claimed Species too closely resembled Alien, down to the “punching tongue” Sil uses to knock out Preston Lennox (Madsen) at one point, and, of course, the film’s famous birth scene, which Giger likened to the chestburster scene in Alien. To that end, Giger reportedly made it a point to ensure Sil was killed by a bullet to the head and not flame-throwers in the film’s third act, which, to Giger, were “completely out of the Alien atmosphere” and evoked both Alien 3 and Terminator 2.

Species Has Many Lapses

Species was a box office success but was a middling critical effort. The dialogue was off, and the characters were often too underwritten to carry much weight. Ben Kingsley, in particular, is a poor and unlikeable choice for Fitch. Whitaker’s empathy mostly hangs in the background, spouting the obvious. Sil’s is played by Michelle Williams in her pre-adult stages and by Natasha Henstridge when she hits adulthood and gains superpowers. Henstridge’s performance was excellent, but never given much to work with besides makeout scenes after makeout scenes.

The themes, from bioethics to alien contact and instinct to overreaching maternal sentiment, were mostly hinted at rather than fully developed. For a movie that had the concept of a genetically modified half-alien/half-human woman on its side, Species was somehow both too ambitious and not ambitious enough. Feldman, the writer, had been thinking about a particular Arthur C. Clarke article that posited aliens would never be able to visit Earth because faster-than-light travel is statistically improbable. Feldman thought: What if aliens contacted Earth not with the blueprints to faster-than-light travel but with the tools to create organic life? In other words, an invasive alien species built Earth’s DNA.

The ensult was a hard-science sci-fi cautionary hybrid and creature feature, which would no doubt split test audiences between those who love and those who loathe. It may never find its place among the Alien and Terminator movies, but Species developed its cult following and a reason. Between Henstridge’s memorable and otherworldly performance, Madsen’s scruffy line-reading as a killer-for-hire, nd Giger’s immortal design, Species endures as a quintessential ’90s sci-fi curiosity.

A post shared by Vulture (@vulture)Species turns 30 years old this year, an appropriate reminder of the strange career of actor Michael Madsen and a fitting tribute to one of his more under-appreciated turns. Happy birthday, Species. May you live forever.