Species (1995)
150 Best Science Fiction movies, Rolling Stone list
#146. Species (1995)
“Species” is a mostly well-made, but ultimately
piss-poor, Exploitation Film the received an undeservedly huge budget because a
certain Nepotism Baby, Producer Frank Mancuso, Jr. (son of the CEO of Paramount
and then MGM), had already scored big by taking over the risible “Friday the 13th”
Francise with the second film (first film 1980, second 1981) and continued to
beat that dead horse until it spat out another eleven entries (there hasn’t
been one since 2009, so cross your fingers and pray it’s finally over). I guess
this film was his bid at legitimacy because the Cast’s five Leads included two
Oscar Winners, three more who were either Nominated or Won other significant
Acting Awards, featured a promising, drop-dead gorgeous, Newcomer, the Monster
was designed by Oscar Winner and then built by another Oscar Winner and an Emmy
Winner, the Stunt Crew featured an Olympic Gold Medalist, the Director had
truly great films on his resume, etc, etc … but all we got from all that talent
was blockheaded rip-off of “Alien” (1979) coming so late-in-the-game that this kind
of trash should’ve been regulated to the direct-to-video market.
And there was promise here, which only
made things all the worse. The film’s great virtues were:
1.)
A
new premise – oh, wait, NO! It wasn’t new, but no one in the USA was familiar
with the British TV miniseries it was ripped-off from.
2.)
Two
strong female Protagonists, Hero Dr. Laura Baker, played by Marg Helgenberger
(three Golden Gold and five Emmy Nominations), and Villian Sil, played by Natasha
Henstridge (the
Newcomer, an internationally recognized fashion model).
3.)
Henstridge is naked a lot. I mean a lot, a lot.
Its worst flaws:
1.)
Scriptwriter
Dennis Feldman took precious little
advantage of the premise.
2.)
The superlative
cast (in addition to Helgenberger and Henstridge there was Ben Kingsley
(one Oscar Win and three Nominations), Michael Madsen
(Independent Spirit Award Winner), Alfred Molina
(one Golden Globe and three BAFTA Nominations), and Forest Whitaker
(Oscar Winner)) were
hindered by Characters that shrank, not grew, as the story progressed and the increasingly
stupid dialogue.
3.)
(closely
related to 2.) Villian Sil, a potentially interesting early on, also proved one-note.
So, other than her being naked so often, the film quickly lost sight of what Henstridge, to our surprise, had
to offer.
The premise was borrowed from “A for
Andromeda” (1961), Scripted by Fredick Hoyle and John Elliot, wherein in Humans
receive messages from Aliens too far away to directly visit Earth (Author Hoyle
was also a Cosmologist and the rare SF author who tried to not violate the
restrictions put on us by the Speed of Light). These Aliens send instructions
on how to build one of their Species, really, an Alien/Human Hybrid, and we
stupidly followed those instructions. The results proved problematic. The miniseries
had Horror elements but sophisticated in conception, and unlike this film, never
degenerated into a cheap Body-Count movie. It was well-regarded at the time and
was the beginning of the stardom of Actress Julie Christie, but unfortunately, BBC
wiped the original video tapes (they did that a lot, notably with many classic
episodes of “Doctor Who” (TV series first aired 1963)) so it’s now lost and
gone forever … well, except for two remakes (1971 & 2007).
I can find no evidence that Feldman ever acknowledged “A for
Andromeda” as an inspiration. Instead claims he read an article by Cosmologist/Novelist
Arthur
C. Clarke about the insurmountable odds against an Extraterrestrial
Craft ever locating and visiting Earth, "I
read in a scientific report that the phenomenal distances between stars made
travelling here in a spaceship virtually impossible, so, I hypothesized that
contact more likely could be made via information. In order for 'them' to find
us, however, we had to give out directions. It occurred to me that, in nature,
one species would not want a predator to know where it hides. We've become so
dominant on this planet that we've lost sight of the fact that we're a species,
like any other. Maybe we shouldn't be so freely broadcasting where we live to
lifeforms that might prey upon us.”
Feldman admitted he wanted to do more with this
film, discuss Mankind's place in the Universe, how other Civilizations would
perceive and relate to Mankind ("… maybe not a potential threat, maybe a
competitor, maybe a resource … The
original script was much more science fiction than horror."), and address Sil's Existentialist Crisis, but none of that
made it into the final product. Feldman has a number of other produced scripts,
most SF,F&H, the rest merely unrealistic, and none of them are any good.
In the “Species,” the Humans
make the same stupid mistake as they did in “A for Andromeda” and soon-to-be-Villain
Sil is the result (early in the film she’s played by 14-year-old Michelle Williams who grew up to be a multiple Oscar
Nominee). She’s sweet appearing, but is physically maturing at remarkable speed
and starting to display disturbing powers. Xavier Fitch (Kingsley), who runs
the Secret Government Lab she’s held in, decides to kill her (this movie is
remarkably passe about Child Murder in both the beginning and end). Recognizing
she’s threatened, Sil escapes.
Soon Sil’s boarded a train wherein she grows a Cocoon
around herself. That Cocoon eats a Train Conductor (Ester Scott), and Sil finally
reemerges as blonde, naked, and beautiful Venus in a Half-Shell (she’s now
played by Henstridge). This is where the indifference to Storytelling first
becomes apparent; as Sil steps off the train, she’s stolen the Conductor’s
uniform which is both clean and well-fitting, two things the prior scene made
impossible. Still, at this point Henstridge is still showing she might actually
be an Actress as Sil struggles with, but unconvincingly quickly learns, how to
navigate unfamiliar Human world: She was born with exceptional Fashion Sence,
but can’t hook a bra. First time behind the wheel of a car she drives like
Mario Andretti, but doesn’t understand gas-tanks need to be filled. Critic Owen
Gleiberman mocked how facile the most promising
part of the movie proved to be, calling it, “‘Alien’ crossed
with ‘Splash.’”
Though Henstridge
wasn’t near the same caliber a Thespian as the rest of the Cast, she’s still sympathetic
and appealing even after killing an innocent (which was something like her
fourth kill). Henstridge’s post-“Species” Acting work would remain steady, but
mostly marginal products; she’d shown a flair for Comedy in a couple films, but
her work has mostly been regulated to bottom-of-the-barrel Action and Horror.
To stop Sil, Xavier assembled
a team of Alien Hunters based on their Expertise, except their Expertises made little
sense, nor did it make any sense that Xavier goes into the field with them. The
whole of this “Crack” Team are: Kate, a Molecular Biologist, which makes sense
inside the lab, not on the streets; Dr.
Stephen Arden (Molina), a cultural
Anthropologist, which makes even less sense; Dan Smithson
(Whittaker), and empath who seemed capable nothing but saying, “Something
terrible happened here,” while standing over a bloody corpse; and Preston Lennox (Madsen), the only
one with Military experience, never on display, he seems more like a Mafia
Hitman, and carries no special weapons or equipment. There’s almost no sense of
any Command and Control beyond these five. Personally, if I were Xavier, I
would’ve used my Top-Secret clout to call in FBI’s VICAP and unleash to full
resources of the Federal Government against this Global Threat.
The funniest line draws
attention to how the allegedly brilliant Xavier is just a dim-whit in disguise:
Fitch explains that he made Sil female so she'd be "more docile and
controllable."
Preston: "I guess you don't get out much."
Sil is Super-Humanly fast, strong, and self-healing, plus
capable of effortlessly Shape-Shifting. She doesn’t Mimic other Humans’
apparencies, which would’ve made sense in context, but takes on several
Monstrous forms designed by H.R. Giger (Oscar Winner) and realized by Richard
Edlund (Oscar Winner) and Steven Johnson (Emmy Winner). Her main motivation is
an Overwhelming Urge Breed and Laura deduces that Sil was intended as a
Biological Weapon: If she’s allowed to run free long enough to reproduce, her
Species’ accelerated Rate of Maturity would allow for exponential Population Growth;
combine that with her Super Powers and this new Species would be completive
with Human kind for World Domination in extreme short order. She’s the ultimate
Weed Species.
(Later in the film, the last good dialogue scene after the
movie turned stupid, Sil and Laura meet in a bathroom but Laura doesn’t know
who Sil is yet. They’re both interested in Preston and there’s a delicious
bitchiness to the exchange.)
This film borrows/steals from
other of sources beyond “A for Andromeda” and “Alien,” for example, the Crime
Thriller “Panic in the Streets” (1950), about the search for a fugitive through
a crowded city who unknowingly carries a highly Infectious Disease. As
elsewhere, the film stole ideas but failed to familiarize itself with why the
source of the ideas was interesting. “Species” repeatedly traps itself in
narrative corners and always used the dumbest path out. Not only Xavier, but
our entire Crack-Team, become increasingly dim, only capable of following a
trail of mutilated bodies. At one point the Team’s futile running exhausts them
and Xavier says, "All right, we're beat. We'll start again tomorrow."
So, Xavier actually gave Sil eight extra hours to either run farther away or
find a Toy-Boy.
One
can’t make too many complaints about Director Roger Donaldson. He had only one other SF credit, the Extreme-Low-Budget
Future War film, “Sleeping Dogs” (1977), most of his background was in Crime
Thrillers like “No Way Out” (1987), and that was reflected in most of the Storytelling
that didn’t involve Henstridge being naked. His work was crisp and efficient, he kept the
camera in motion skillfully, but, as Critic James
Berardinelli wrote, “‘Species’ sticks with basic scare
tactics -- things jumping out of the shadows to the accompaniment of a surge of
music. There are moments of high energy, but the pace is basically one of ebb
and flow, and there's not much atmosphere to speak of.”
As the killings become less-and-less motivated and
more sexualized (there’s an amusingly lethal French kiss that says a lot of
this film’s Intellectual Level), Sil is reduced to a cog in the plot mechanics and
her emerging Character evaporates. Even her main motivation, Breeding, becomes staler
the closer she getting it fulfilled (would it really take a beautiful, sexually
promiscuous, woman, wandering Los Angeles, that many hours just to get laid?). Critics
came up with some zippy lines to express their disdain, like Mike LaSalle, “The Girl Can’t Help It” (referring to
the 1956 Sex Comedy Starring Jane Mansfield, of which was said "Her range, at this stage, appears
restricted to a weak imitation of Marilyn Monroe”), and Richard Schieb, “‘Basic Instinct’ [1992] with
tentacles.” Let me add my own, “Between Sil’s bad choices in Paramours and the Crack-Team’s
Cock-Blocking, this whole enterprise starts feeling like an insufferable 1980s Teenage
Sex-Comedy like ‘The Last American Virgin’ (1982) trying to somehow achieve the
Body Count of a ‘Friday the 13th’ movie.”
++++++++++++++++
As Critic Susan George noted, SF has, “been preoccupied with creation and procreation ever since Mary Shelley's “Frankenstein”
[novel, first published in 1818]. Recent American science fiction films are
heavily invested in these concerns because they so spectacularly intersect with
the genre's fundamental subject matter, that is, with science and technology,
which represent another sort of creative power–one that these texts have
traditionally linked to and placed in masculine rather than feminine hands.”
George sees that these films almost always Monster-izing any
form of non-traditional Birth, so any that challenge the familiar order, as reflective
the anxieties of a perceived Male Disempowerment. In “Alien,” things didn’t
work out so well for the Pregnant Man, and in this film, the Patriarchy is right
in denying Sil her Maternal Instinct. Every man who is attracted to Sil is
killed by her, the only male who comes out well here is Preston, an undisguised
thug, while the most annoying male, Dan, doesn’t become convincingly Masculine
until he finally embraces Preston’s blunt savagery. As the film gets dumber and
dumber, its embrace of the Misogynistic styles of ‘80s cinema become more-and-more
pronounced, right up to the stupid catchphrase spoken by Preston as he finally
dispatches Monster Sil in the climax.
And the climax seemed cheap even though it was expensively shot.
The Team chases the now pregnant Monster into a parking garage beneath the Millenium
Biltmore Hotel (the Crack Team was staying there on a Government expense
account?!?!?!), which leads to a labyrinth of caverns beneath LA (huh?), which
leads to a subterranean oil lake (huh?), which closely echoes the
claustrophobic environments of the “Alien” franchise. There was another version
of the script which had the final confrontation played out in a public Drive-In,
it involved a large Military Assault
while a Monster Movie played on the screen in the background; its abandonment suggested
the film wasn’t just running out of ideas, but money.
High praise should be given to the FX team though, especially Johnson,
but only Giger received poster credit, and he landed out hating the film.
It was back in the 1970s, when Ridley Scott was tapped as the
Director of “Alien,” that he was first exposed to H.R. Giger’s paintings and he
fell instantly in love with the uniquely beautiful and sinister “Biomechanical”
figures. Scott reportedly said to another member of the production something like,
“Either all our problems are over or they just got worse.” Ridley considered it
a great stroke of luck that Giger was just as skilled a Sculptor as he was a Painter.
“Alien” wasn’t actually Giger’s first film project, he’d part of the Team
assembled by Director Alejandro Jodorowsky for his never-realized adaptation of Frank Herbert’s novel “Dune,”
and much of the magic of “Alien” was made possible by Scott sweeping-up the
failed “Dune’s” Production Team.
“Species” came roughly 30-years after “Alien” and FX technology
had advanced far beyond where it had been when Giger made history and won his
Oscar. By the mid-1990s his imaginings could be realized far better than ever before,
but also required more than his once-cutting-edge Skill Set as a Sculptor. The Mutating
Monster Sil pushed the envelope of what was possible in 1995 with a then-unique
combination of CGI,
motion-capture, puppetry, animatronics, stunt work by Dana Hee (Olympic Gold Medalist),
and a Monster voice provided by Frank Welker (one of the best paid Voice Actors
in the USA). Giger Drew, Painted, and Sculpted from Switzerland while Johnson and
Edlund at Boss Studios in the USA adapted his work and labored to create what
the Director Donaldson would work with.
Johnson, "Giger's designs are fluid, marked with raw
motion on the canvas, and they are incredibly erotic. When you're asked to
bring one of his creations to three dimensions, it's a difficult thing to
achieve, because you have to take a loose, fluid approach to it. I think one
reason the entire process turned out as well as it did is that we stayed in
very tight communication with him.”
There’s a funny anecdote
concerning two Artists trying to collaborate though the was an Ocean in-between
them. For Giger, English is a second language that he never fully mastered, so
while on the phone explaining how one of the earlier Transformations was
supposed to play out on Sil’s face he said "pickles"
should be erupting, but he had meant to say, "pimples," so in the
film Actress Williams started breaking out in what look like “kosher dills.”
Giger’s Biomechanicals
almost always had translucent elements, far more difficult to realize than the
merely transparent. Johnson again, "Our creature has a complex skin
process that allows light to penetrate, as well as play across the body
structure. It is a unique and horrifying being, yet a thing of beauty as well.
One of the coolest elements of the creature was that it's translucent and you
see through it, so it couldn't be done in the normal way. One thing that helped
us out a lot was all the materials research we'd done for ‘The Abyss’ [1989,
and a film that didn’t involve Giger] … for the floating aliens at the
end."
In the Boss sculptures,
the Monster-ized Sil’s head was multi-layered, a skull visible beneath the lovely
face with moving bands in-between that suggested muscles and created expressions.
At this point, at least, Giger was pleased with the collaboration.
But from the
start Giger had concerns that “Species” would devolve into an “Alien” Rip-Off
and that’s exactly what happened. "Why must this film be made so much in a
repeat way? I think we must have better ideas and we should not be known as the
rip-off people of other films. Not only this, but a bad light is shed upon me
for being so redundant. You assured me that we would have a film without having
to copy other highlights so closely. The tongue looks too much like a carrot.
This tongue is not for pulling out, but is to punch through his head just like
the design I made for ‘Alien.’
"You
can say whatever you want about me. That I'm a bad designer, that I'm late and
don't understand the ways of Hollywood. The one thing I can feel, however, is
when the film comes too close to ‘Alien, II & III,’ that is very bad for
all of us.”
Leslie Barany, Giger's Agent, added, "The film's lack
of originality is not because Giger has chosen to imitate himself. It should be
clear that he has tried to surpass himself … It should be clear … that he
recognized every scene and effect which bore similarity to his early works,
immediately, and tried very hard to convince MGM to listen to his new ideas.
"Giger worked harder and longer on ‘Species’
than any film before. He even got involved in script change suggestions which
would have added true horror and human depth to the story.”
Giger wrote the un-used Drive-In climax
and created two dream sequences for
the film, both reduced to a mere handful of seconds over his objections. One of
these involved a Ghost Train, and evolution of one of his designs for “Dune”
and then later for Director Scott’s “Dead
Reckoning” (another film that was never realized). He built fully operational, scale-models of the
train, the train station, and storyboarded the action with specific camera
movements so that all could be done with Blue-Screen, not the more expensive CGI.
He was furious so little of the two dreams made
it into the film.
I remember the year it came out and I was invited to a party of
top SF Authors and Editors associated with the Clarion Workshop. Most of them
had seen the film but I hadn’t yet.
The consensus was that the film was bad, Henstridge was beautiful, and the Ghost Train was the film’s most visually
striking sequence but absurdly short.
Giger praised much of Boss’s earlier
constructions, but later complained that “two completely different Sils
appeared in the movie. There was the—for me, aesthetically convincing—
transparent [he meant “translucent”] puppet built by Johnson and the other,
absolutely not transparent, teeth-gnashing, unaesthetic computer-Sil, which has
nothing to do with my ideas. Unfortunately, this computercontrolled, frog-like
ugliness appears in the last ten minutes of the film and I can only hope that
viewers will not consider it synonymous with my work. I want to distance myself
from this Sil, which has nothing to do with my concept.” He railed more at Edlund
than Johnson, and more at MGM than Edlund, "I do not want to work with MGM
liars!"
Johnson came to Edlund’s defense, "When
the movie came out, he [Giger] was so happy. He was full of accolades. Two
months later he changes his mind, and he does this historically. He did it on ‘Poltergeist
2’ [1986] and ‘Alien 3’ [1992]. He always hates his work when other people do
it because he doesn't do it. As long as he's the sculptor and he puts his
finishing touches on the thing, he's happy. It's sad that he does this, because
a lot of people worked incredibly hard on this film. But it's not
uncharacteristic of him to rain dislike on people who attempt to interpret his
work on the screen, as with Ridley Scott and David Fincher. It's the artist's
need for control over his baby, I think." And elsewhere he said, “I really can't complain because as
much as Giger's unhappy, I think he's unhappy because he's not as directly
involved in the film and doesn't quite understand as well that it's a group
effort all the time. "It's not really fair to criticize after the fact
until we're out there producing and directing our own film. I don't think we're
ever going to get our artistic images exactly the way we want them."
Giger was even pissed off at the
poster, painted in his style, with the same tall and narrow lettering of the
“Alien” poster, and Sil in a womb mimicking the “Alien” poster’s composition. "I realized after seeing
‘Species’ that I was hired for my name, which seems to be closely linked to
‘Alien’ eve n if they say things to the contrary." And Baraby, “Giger
feels used and betrayed. He is reminded that the only true nightmare that
Hollywood is capable of producing is a legal one."
Giger wasn’t the only
person who complained of the CGI, but it was mostly praised (four different
sources awarded the film Best FX and it was nominated for the same by a fifth).
Personally, I was impressed with what I saw. I suspect the more negative opinions
of the FX were born of being annoyed with the rest of the film. Hell, another
thirty-years have passed since and I still think it holds up.
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