Species (film)
Encyclopedia
Species is a 1995 science fiction
Science fiction film
Science fiction film is a film genre that uses science fiction: speculative, science-based depictions of phenomena that are not necessarily accepted by mainstream science, such as extraterrestrial life forms, alien worlds, extrasensory perception, and time travel, often along with futuristic...

 horror film
Horror film
Horror films seek to elicit a negative emotional reaction from viewers by playing on the audience's most primal fears. They often feature scenes that startle the viewer through the means of macabre and the supernatural, thus frequently overlapping with the fantasy and science fiction genres...

 directed by Roger Donaldson
Roger Donaldson
Roger Donaldson is an Australian-born New Zealand film producer, director and writer who has made numerous successful movies. He was a co-founder of the New Zealand Film Commission.-Life and career:...

, and starring Ben Kingsley
Ben Kingsley
Sir Ben Kingsley, CBE is a British actor. He has won an Oscar, BAFTA, Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild awards in his career. He is known for starring as Mohandas Gandhi in the film Gandhi in 1982, for which he won the Academy Award for Best Actor...

, Michael Madsen
Michael Madsen
Michael Søren Madsen is an American actor, poet, and photographer. He has appeared in more than 150 films, most of them small independent films, though he has starred in central roles in such films as Reservoir Dogs, Free Willy, Donnie Brasco, and Kill Bill, in addition to a supporting role in Sin...

, Alfred Molina
Alfred Molina
Alfred Molina is a British-born American actor. He first came to public attention in the UK for his supporting role in the 1987 film Prick Up Your Ears...

, Forest Whitaker
Forest Whitaker
Forest Steven Whitaker is an American actor, producer, and director. He has earned a reputation for intensive character study work for films such as Bird and Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, and for his recurring role as ex-LAPD Lieutenant Jon Kavanaugh on the gritty, award-winning television...

, Marg Helgenberger
Marg Helgenberger
Mary Marg Helgenberger is an American film and television actress known for her roles as Catherine Willows in the CBS drama CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, and as K.C...

, and Natasha Henstridge
Natasha Henstridge
Natasha T. Henstridge is a Canadian fashion model turned actress. Her most notable on-screen roles include Species, The Whole Nine Yards, It Had To Be You, Ghosts of Mars, She Spies, the TV series Eli Stone, and the Canadian TV mini-series Would Be Kings, for which she won the Gemini Award for...

. The film is about a group of scientists who try to track down and trap a killer alien
Extraterrestrial life
Extraterrestrial life is defined as life that does not originate from Earth...

 seductress before she successfully mates with a human male.

The film produced one theatrical sequel
Sequel
A sequel is a narrative, documental, or other work of literature, film, theatre, or music that continues the story of or expands upon issues presented in some previous work...

 in 1998, Species II
Species II
Species II is a 1998 sequel to the 1995 film Species. It stars Natasha Henstridge, Michael Madsen and Marg Helgenberger, all of whom reprise their roles from the first film. It also features actor James Cromwell as "Senator Judson Ross"...

, which had Henstridge, Madsen, and Helgenberger reprise their roles. It was followed by the direct-to-video
Direct-to-video
Direct-to-video is a term used to describe a film that has been released to the public on home video formats without being released in film theaters or broadcast on television...

 Species III
Species III
Species III is a 2004 science fiction film. Directed by Brad Turner, it is the third installment of the Species series and stars Robert Knepper, Sunny Mabrey, Robin Dunne, Amelia Cooke, and John Paul Pitoc...

in 2004 and Species: The Awakening in 2007, which stands as a separate film, not as an official follow-up to the previous three.

Plot

Earth's scientists sent out transmissions with information about Earth and its inhabitants, DNA structure, etc., in hopes of finding life beyond Earth. They then receive transmissions from an alien source on how to create endless fuel effortlessly. Therefore, the scientists assume that this is a friendly alien species. But from a second alien transmission, the scientists receive information about an alien DNA
DNA
Deoxyribonucleic acid is a nucleic acid that contains the genetic instructions used in the development and functioning of all known living organisms . The DNA segments that carry this genetic information are called genes, but other DNA sequences have structural purposes, or are involved in...

 along with instructions on how to splice it with human DNA. A government team led by Xavier Fitch (Ben Kingsley
Ben Kingsley
Sir Ben Kingsley, CBE is a British actor. He has won an Oscar, BAFTA, Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild awards in his career. He is known for starring as Mohandas Gandhi in the film Gandhi in 1982, for which he won the Academy Award for Best Actor...

) goes forward with the genetic experiment hoping to induce a female with "more docile and controllable" traits. The alien is the result of the SETI
SETI
The search for extraterrestrial intelligence is the collective name for a number of activities people undertake to search for intelligent extraterrestrial life. Some of the most well known projects are run by the SETI Institute. SETI projects use scientific methods to search for intelligent life...

 (Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence) program. One of the hundred experimental ova produces a girl named Sil, who looks like a normal human but develops into a 12-year old in 3 months.

Sil's violent outbursts during sleep make the scientists consider her a threat. They try to kill her using cyanide gas but instead she breaks out of her containment cell and escapes. The government assembles a team composed of anthropologist Dr. Stephen Arden (Alfred Molina
Alfred Molina
Alfred Molina is a British-born American actor. He first came to public attention in the UK for his supporting role in the 1987 film Prick Up Your Ears...

), molecular biologist Dr. Laura Baker (Marg Helgenberger
Marg Helgenberger
Mary Marg Helgenberger is an American film and television actress known for her roles as Catherine Willows in the CBS drama CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, and as K.C...

), empath Dan Smithson (Forest Whitaker
Forest Whitaker
Forest Steven Whitaker is an American actor, producer, and director. He has earned a reputation for intensive character study work for films such as Bird and Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, and for his recurring role as ex-LAPD Lieutenant Jon Kavanaugh on the gritty, award-winning television...

) and mercenary Preston "Press" Lennox (Michael Madsen
Michael Madsen
Michael Søren Madsen is an American actor, poet, and photographer. He has appeared in more than 150 films, most of them small independent films, though he has starred in central roles in such films as Reservoir Dogs, Free Willy, Donnie Brasco, and Kill Bill, in addition to a supporting role in Sin...

) to track and destroy Sil. Sil matures rapidly into an adult (Natasha Henstridge
Natasha Henstridge
Natasha T. Henstridge is a Canadian fashion model turned actress. Her most notable on-screen roles include Species, The Whole Nine Yards, It Had To Be You, Ghosts of Mars, She Spies, the TV series Eli Stone, and the Canadian TV mini-series Would Be Kings, for which she won the Gemini Award for...

) in her early twenties and makes her way to Los Angeles. This makes tracking her extremely difficult. She is incredibly strong and intelligent with amazing regenerative powers. The scientists fear she may mate with human males and produce offspring that could eliminate the human race. Sil lacks inhibitions when it comes to killing people who get in her way and wants to produce offspring as soon as possible. She frequently morphs into her alien form, a bipedal creature with tentacles on her shoulders and back.

Sil tries first to mate with a man she meets at a night club, but after sensing that he is diabetic, rejects and kills him by puncturing his skull with her tongue. She then tries to mate with a man she meets after a car accident; this is interrupted by Press and Laura. She kills the man and flees naked into a forest without being seen by the team. She pretends to be a rape victim, and then proceeds to kidnap a woman. She fakes her death by crashing the woman's car into a tree during a high-speed chase.

After cutting and dyeing her hair, she takes an attraction to Press and attempts to seduce him. She eventually copulates with Arden; then kills him when he realizes who she is and what he has done. The rest of the team then follow her into the sewers where Fitch is subsequently killed and the area where she and her offspring are destroyed. Press uses a grenade launcher on Sil, blowing her head off. The trio leaves the area. The last scene shows a rat chewing on one of Sil's severed tentacles; it starts to mutate into a vicious beast and attacks another rat.

Cast

  • Ben Kingsley
    Ben Kingsley
    Sir Ben Kingsley, CBE is a British actor. He has won an Oscar, BAFTA, Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild awards in his career. He is known for starring as Mohandas Gandhi in the film Gandhi in 1982, for which he won the Academy Award for Best Actor...

     as Xavier Fitch
  • Michael Madsen
    Michael Madsen
    Michael Søren Madsen is an American actor, poet, and photographer. He has appeared in more than 150 films, most of them small independent films, though he has starred in central roles in such films as Reservoir Dogs, Free Willy, Donnie Brasco, and Kill Bill, in addition to a supporting role in Sin...

     as Preston "Press" Lennox
  • Alfred Molina
    Alfred Molina
    Alfred Molina is a British-born American actor. He first came to public attention in the UK for his supporting role in the 1987 film Prick Up Your Ears...

     as Dr. Stephen Arden
  • Forest Whitaker
    Forest Whitaker
    Forest Steven Whitaker is an American actor, producer, and director. He has earned a reputation for intensive character study work for films such as Bird and Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, and for his recurring role as ex-LAPD Lieutenant Jon Kavanaugh on the gritty, award-winning television...

     as Dan Smithson
  • Marg Helgenberger
    Marg Helgenberger
    Mary Marg Helgenberger is an American film and television actress known for her roles as Catherine Willows in the CBS drama CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, and as K.C...

     as Dr. Laura Baker
  • Natasha Henstridge
    Natasha Henstridge
    Natasha T. Henstridge is a Canadian fashion model turned actress. Her most notable on-screen roles include Species, The Whole Nine Yards, It Had To Be You, Ghosts of Mars, She Spies, the TV series Eli Stone, and the Canadian TV mini-series Would Be Kings, for which she won the Gemini Award for...

     as Sil
  • Michelle Williams
    Michelle Williams (actress)
    Michelle Ingrid Williams is an American actress. After starting her career with television guest appearances in the early 1990s, Williams achieved recognition for her role as Jen Lindley on the WB television teen drama Dawson's Creek, which she played from 1998 to 2003...

     as Young Sil
  • Whip Hubley
    Whip Hubley
    Whip Hubley is an American actor. He is best known for playing the role of Mischa in the 1987 film Russkies, and Hollywood in the 1986 film Top Gun. He later played Brian Hawkins in the Showtime miniseries More Tales of the City and its follow-up Further Tales of the City...

     as John Carey

Production

The creature was created and designed by Swiss artist H. R. Giger
H. R. Giger
Hans Rudolf "Ruedi" Giger is a Swiss surrealist painter, sculptor, and set designer. He won an Academy Award for Best Achievement for Visual Effects for his design work on the film Alien.-Early life:...

, who also created the creature
Xenomorph (Alien)
The Alien is a fictional endoparasitoid extraterrestrial species that is the primary antagonist of the Alien film series. The species made its debut in the 1979 film Alien, and reappeared in its sequels Aliens , Alien 3 , and Alien Resurrection , two crossovers Alien vs...

s in the Alien
Alien (film)
Alien is a 1979 science fiction horror film directed by Ridley Scott and starring Tom Skerritt, Sigourney Weaver, Veronica Cartwright, Harry Dean Stanton, John Hurt, Ian Holm and Yaphet Kotto. The film's title refers to its primary antagonist: a highly aggressive extraterrestrial creature which...

films.

Differences in comic adaptation

The comic adaptation, from Dark Horse Comics
Dark Horse Comics
Dark Horse Comics is the largest independent American comic book and manga publisher.Dark Horse Comics was founded in 1986 by Mike Richardson in Milwaukie, Oregon, with the concept of establishing an ideal atmosphere for creative professionals. Richardson started out by opening his first comic book...

, included many scenes that were not in the film. These included:
  • The film originally began with scientists discovering the alien signal in space and Fitch having a meeting with the government to begin this experiment of combining alien DNA to a human host. A shot of the scientists discovering the signal was in the theatrical trailer. The scene with Fitch's introduction was cut out as the sequence was explained to the team consisting of Press, Laura, Dan and Steve later in the final film. There were also publicity stills of Fitch with the 2-week old Sil in some press kits for the film that did not make the cut.
  • Sil's dreams were more intense and organic involving mutant worms and acid. Due to budgetary reasons, this was never filmed.
  • As in the novel, the interpretation of Sil's rejection of a man is a green mist surrounding the host that was not apparent in the film.
  • Sil's fantasy dream of her making love to Press was hinted in the film but not shown in its entirety. The two make love in her dream and Press mutates into a creature, restraining her with his arms around her hips and tentacles. Sil struggles to no avail and Press then penetrates her with spikes into Sil's chest, she screams and the dream ends. She wakes up with a shock from her nightmare.
  • In the adaptation, Sil's death is not as dramatic as in the film which involved fire and tension. In the comics, she gets blown to bits from Press's cannon blaster and is splattered all over the cavern. In the film she supposedly dies from multiple gun shots and falls into a pit of ignited oil but returns to kill Dan only to have her head blown off by Press's cannon blaster and fall into the flaming pit.
  • In the alternative ending, Press sits with Laura on an embankment and mentions how he respected her with human qualities. They then kiss and hug each other with relief that they survived. Laura poses the question whether Sil's aggression was part of her alien biology, or if it came from the human part of her DNA? Laura reminds Press that humans are a predatory species (as indicated by their binocular vision
    Binocular vision
    Binocular vision is vision in which both eyes are used together. The word binocular comes from two Latin roots, bini for double, and oculus for eye. Having two eyes confers at least four advantages over having one. First, it gives a creature a spare eye in case one is damaged. Second, it gives a...

    , a point raised earlier in the film). This was featured on the Special Edition DVD and was shot at a pier near an ice cream shop. The ending was re-shot by Boss films under the direction of Roger Donaldson involving the mutated rat puppet.

Novelization

Written by Yvonne Navarro
Yvonne Navarro
Yvonne Navarro is an American author who has published over twenty books. Of those twenty, the titles AfterAge, deadrush, Final Impact, Red Shadows, DeadTimes, That's Not My Name and Mirror Me were solo novels, or fiction created solely by her...

 from the original screenplay, the book gives several in depth details about the characters not seen in the film, such as Sil's ability to visualize odors and determine harmful substances from edible items by the color. Gas appears black, food appears pink, an unhealthy potential mate appears to give off green fumes. Other character details include Press's background in tracking down AWOL soldiers as well as the process of decoding the alien signal. Although no clues are given as to its origin, it is mentioned that the message was somehow routed through several black hole
Black hole
A black hole is a region of spacetime from which nothing, not even light, can escape. The theory of general relativity predicts that a sufficiently compact mass will deform spacetime to form a black hole. Around a black hole there is a mathematically defined surface called an event horizon that...

s to mask its point of origin.

Parts of these extra scenes and details are shown in the comic book adaptation by Titan Books
Titan Books
Titan Publishing Group is an independently owned publishing company, established in 1981. It is based at offices in London, England's Bankside area. The Books Division has two main areas of publishing: film & TV tie-ins/cinema reference books; and graphic novels and comics reference/art titles. The...

. There is also a novelization by Navarro for Species II which follows the film's original screenplay with added scenes.

Reception

Species received mixed however mainly negative reviews. It currently holds an approval rating of 40% at Rotten tomatoes
Rotten Tomatoes
Rotten Tomatoes is a website devoted to reviews, information, and news of films—widely known as a film review aggregator. Its name derives from the cliché of audiences throwing tomatoes and other vegetables at a poor stage performance...

 based on 30 reviews (12 positive, 18 negative). Roger Ebert
Roger Ebert
Roger Joseph Ebert is an American film critic and screenwriter. He is the first film critic to win a Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.Ebert is known for his film review column and for the television programs Sneak Previews, At the Movies with Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, and Siskel and Ebert and The...

 gave the film 2 out of 4 stars, criticizing the film's plot and overall lack of intelligence. Cristine James from Boxoffice magazine
Boxoffice (magazine)
Boxoffice is a film industry magazine dedicated to the movie theatre business published by Boxoffice Media LP. It started in 1920 as The Reel Journal, taking its current name in 1931 and still publishes today, with an intended audience of theatre owners and film professionals.Boxoffice is the...

gave the film 2 out of 5 stars, describing it as "... 'Alien' meets 'V' meets 'Splash' meets 'Playboy's Erotic Fantasies: Forbidden Liaisons,' diluted into a diffuse, misdirected bore." James Berardinelli
James Berardinelli
James Berardinelli is an American online film critic.-Personal life:Berardinelli was born in New Brunswick, New Jersey and spent his early childhood in Morristown, New Jersey. At the age of nine years, he relocated to the township of Cherry Hill, New Jersey...

gave the film 2 and a half out of 4 stars, stating "as long as you don't stop to think about what's going on, Species is capable of offering its share of cheap thrills, with a laugh or two thrown in as well".
The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
x
OK