Contrary to what you may have heard on the net and elsewhere, the first half of Species is actually a charming little B-movie. It's not so much that the film's troubles begin halfway through, but that it makes a string of bad decisions that forfeit both our goodwill and our willing suspension of disbelief. Still, if it wasn't MGM's flagship release for the summer movie season -- say, if Roger Corman had produced a low-budget version of the same script for his movie series on Showtime -- I can't imagine it would have taken near the critical drubbing it seems to have garnered.
The premise is delicious, if a little incredible: aliens have responded to our search for extraterrestrial life by solicitously beaming back a DNA code. Humans being what we are, we decide to experiment with the stuff, fabricating a syringeful of the otherworldly stuff and then injecting it into a human ovum and growing a small army of human/alien crossbreeds. Silly us. A few die, others are frozen for future study, and one darling little girl, known as Sil, is kept in an isolation chamber for study (she has grown to an apparent 12 years old over the course of a few months). This gives her a lot of sublimated anger, and when the team of scientists led by Ben Kingsley finally decides to gas the child, she breaks through the chamber's glass and escapes. And since this little kid soon grows to womanly proportions and sets out to fulfill her biological imperative to breed (conceivable killing off the human race as she makes tiny monsters), Kingsley sets out after her.
The early scenes seem to cement our identification with Sil (Michelle Williams). Her wide eyes establish her as the loneliest little girl on the planet, and she projects a palpable sense of betrayal when the cyanide gas is turned on and Kingsley mouths down at her: "I'm sorry." Even when she kills a transient, she seems blameless, like a wild animal escaped from captivity. Before she grows a cocoon and morphs into an adult, we watch her months-old mind cope with adolescence. The artist H.R. Giger, who designed the Aliens in the original Alien, worked on Sil, too. The "Ghost Train" that chases Sil in her dreams is all his creation (funded, in fact, by the artist's own money), and symbolizes menstruation, which is actually a mild foreshadowing of the transformation to come. Along with the grisly cocooning sequence, these are the only potentially disturbing scenes in the film.
Just a little later, Sil is full-grown and played by model Natasha Henstridge, who is undeniably gorgeous and makes the whole movie look just a little too much like a cosmetics commercial. Her exploits from then on are episodic (in much the same way as producer Frank Mancuso Jr's films in the seminal Friday the 13th series), as she seduces and dispatches men in a guileless search for one suitable for breeding (moral: never tell a casual sex partner that you're looking to have his baby). That's the fun part. Unfortunately, it's intercut with the comparably tedious exploits of Kingsley's posse. Forest Whitaker is an empath who has the fortuitous skill of sharing other people's feelings over videotape. Michael Madsen gets the requisite Michael Madsen role. And so on, with Alfred Molina and Marg Helgenberger (both perfectly adequate in undemanding roles) rounding out the team.
You'd think that one night in L.A. would be long enough for a sex object of Henstridge's caliber to try mating with about a dozen men, but the script is too clunky and methodical to let her really have at it (though she does go shirtless in at least four, maybe five scenes). A little more development of Sil's character would have gone a long way toward adding a little bit of weight to the same situations, since the audience is predisposed to identify with her early on (she's half human, after all). The less said about the dialogue, the better, I suppose, though these actors struggle mightily with it. The special effects, which consist mainly of Sil's varying transformations into alien form, range from the wickedly effective (early on) to the ho-hum (the last 20 minutes or so, when less really would have been more). And the direction is by Roger Donaldson, a competent thriller maker (No Way Out, The Getaway) who either lacked the clout or was uninterested in making a more substantial horror story from this material.
I saw Species at the end of a week that also included screenings of Belle de Jour, The Last Seduction, and the original Alien. I think Alien is the best of that lot, and it's a good example of the kind of movie Species billed itself as (Giger worked on both). But the thing about all these films is that they are meditations on the female by male filmmakers, and all of them dwell conspicuously on the bizarre: Belle de Jour's casual masochism, The Last Seduction's trenchant moneylust, and Alien's horrified look at the reproductive system. Species exhibits a similar morbid fascination with issues of pregnancy and the female body. It's fitting that Henstridge's body is on display during much of the movie, since her body, with its capacity to morph and transform, is the really terrifying object that the film revolves around.
