HOME | ABOUT | FICTION | INTERVIEWS | FEATURES | REVIEWS | NEWS | BUY THE PRINT MAGAZINE | BACK ISSUES | LINKS | CONTACT US

Species
Roger Donaldson
UK, 1995, 108 minutes
Review by David Clark (1995)

Oh dear. Thoroughly rotten dialogue, lots of bare flesh from ex-model/first-time actress, formulaic-generic, HR Giger monsters (yet again), shades of (most notably) Alien, The Thing, A For Andromeda, Invasion of The Bodysnatchers – Species comes over as a B movie. And B movies were so called because they weren’t ‘A’ movies. In other words, they were, frequently, second string and second rate.

There the story should probably end, except that Species is a major genre movie (MGM’s biggest grossing film ever, actually) and we are supposed to review such things.

So, one dark night in a remote, secret-looking, scientific/military complex (you know the sort of place, always being blown up in Thunderbirds), creepy scientist Xavier Fitch (Ben Kingsley, slumming it) orders what appears to be a young girl, aged about nine or ten, to be gassed. To cut a clichéd story short, she escapes, kills someone, eats like a hyperactive bulimic, grows up, and moves to LA. Kids these days, you just can’t keep up with them, can you? 

Fitch responds by getting a team together (which is supposed to be dramatic) to find her: ex-marine seek and destroy hard man Press (Michael Madsen, slumming it), with irritatingly empathic psychic Dan, biologist Laura and expert of something – anthropology, I think – Stephen (Forest Whitaker, Marg Helsenberger and Alfred Molina, all slumming it). This is all because Sil (the wench) was grown from alien DNA by Fitch, said DNA being somehow beamed to Earth by unknown extraterrestrials assumed to be friendly by the powers that be. Fitch has decided that she’s a killer, sent to mate with a human male to produce a new species to replace humanity (survival of the fittest). Needless to say, they hunt her down and kill her and her delightful sprog, though not before she’s picked up a string of guys and taken her clothes off a lot. Unfortunately, plenty of room is left for a sequel. (I hope you realise that writing this paragraph made me cringe.)

Quite how Species got a cast like this I don’t know. Perhaps this lot thought the story original, or maybe some studio overlord decided on a change of direction, (another all-too-familiar story) making the film a messy compromise. I wonder if Species was originally envisaged as a TV series. It might have made an interesting TV series, some interesting episodes might have emerged. As it is this views like the pilot for a TV show, only written with a couple of deaths because, being a film, some of the characters are now expendable.

There’s a garbled moral message to Species: maybe it was the human half of the new species that made it a monster. Natasha Henstridge as Sil actually does OK in Species, and may well have a career as an actress ahead of her, possibly in a sequel or sequel series to this. Which is just as well, as much of the film is told from her confused, psychopathic viewpoint. Unfortunately we learn little of all this, which is really just a retread of The Thing, and that, basically, is it. 

If you’re in the mood for this sort of thing, Species is reasonably entertaining. For the stupid. For the most oafish, most conventional of the boys in your class at school. And for them I'll mention that most, if not all, coverage of Species features photos of Natasha Henstridge. Ours doesn’t.