Michael Madsen Hunted Aliens Before It Was Cool

Actress Michael Madsen, whose roles in Reservoir Dogs, Kill Bill, and Donnie Brasco had made him an icon for stylized and brutal roles, died earlier this month. Though a great many obituaries have remembered Madsen for his memorable roles in film and television, few have taken a moment to recall his more curious performance as a black ops assassin in the 1995 sci-fi thriller Species. The film, which is turning 30 this year, is itself a forgotten outlier from a particularly glutted era of monster movies and alien paranoia.

Species had been a curiously high-stakes foray for director Roger Donaldson (No Way Out, The Bounty), who made a career in big-budget thrillers like Brainstorm, The World Is Not Enough, and Thelma & Louise. The film begins when the U.S. government receives two transmissions from space: the first holds blueprints for an entirely new fuel source, the second details the precise procedure for splicing alien DNA with human DNA. Naturally, the government acts on both messages. Under the auspices of Dr. Xavier Fitch (Ben Kingsley), the government creates a hybrid, Sil, in her formative years, played by Michelle Williams. The procedure had been expected to create a placid, easily controlled organism; instead, something far more complicated and dangerous is created.

Sil matures rapidly, aging to the appearance of a 12-year-old in the space of three months. But it soon becomes clear that there’s something awry. She has violent nightmares, and troubling signs that Sil may not be as “controllable” as they’d all hoped. Fitch decides to terminate the experiment, releasing cyanide into her holding cell to force her to suffocate, when the now-teenaged Sil escapes from the lab and sets the film into motion.

Fitch, unwilling to lose control of the hybrid so easily, creates a team of experts to hunt her down before she can reproduce: including Madsen’s Preston Lennox, a no-nonsense black ops mercenary; Dr. Laura Baker (Marg Helgenberger), a molecular biologist; Dr. Stephen Arden (Alfred Molina), an anthropologist; and Dan Smithson (Forest Whitaker), a sulking empath who can psychically sense the inner workings of Sil’s emotions. The search spans the country, leading them finally to Los Angeles, where the now full-grown Sil (Natasha Henstridge) is on the hunt to find a mate, reproduce, and establish a new colony. She’s adaptive, intelligent, and all instinct. As Sil kills indiscriminately—a train tramp, a nightclub dancer, and eventually a man she considers her lover—Fitch and his team must stop her before she can reproduce at an accelerated rate.

Sexy Alien Bastard

One of the most immediately arresting aspects of Species, then and now, is the design of the creature itself. Legendary surrealist artist H.R. Giger, perhaps best known for designing the xenomorph from Alien, took on the task of making Sil a creature unlike any other. Giger described her as “an aesthetic warrior, also sensual and deadly.” The process was slow and complicated; Giger described her final form as a “glass body but with carbon inside.” Giger had originally wanted to create several iterations of the alien’s evolution, but was forced to reduce the number of alien mutations due to production requirements. He settled for a cocoon-like transformation and a dramatic maternal alien figure for the finale.

Species, despite its more than respectable box office performance and the appeal of Giger’s design, was not well-received by the artist himself. Giger, who was originally based on Alien 30 years earlier, found Species to be an all-too-close cousin, cribbing too closely from Alien’s iconic design flourishes. The big reveal of Sil’s makeup, Giger pointed out, was a near-clone of the “punching tongue” from Alien, while the notorious climax of the film was little more than Alien’s chestburster moment replicated, with a little more explicit sex. He even reportedly cut in during production to demand that the alien be killed not with a flamethrower (as he felt it too much resembled Alien 3 and Terminator 2), but by a headshot.

Species as a film, despite its aspirations, was largely and widely panned. Much of the dialogue was on-the-nose, and the supporting characters were frequently thin. Kingsley’s Dr. Fitch comes off as a bit amoral and grating, Whitaker’s empath mostly functions to wander onscreen, saying the obvious. The concepts—bioethics, alien contact, motherhood, and reproduction—are only hinted at, and the characters are entirely predictable. And yet, the sheer hubris of the film’s bizarre, and slightly risque, marriage of science fiction and erotic horror gives it a low-camp air, some guilty charm. Feldman, the screenwriter, had been inspired by the work of Arthur C. Clarke, who wrote about the unlikelihood of extraterrestrials coming into contact with earthlings due to the limitations of faster-than-light travel. What if, Feldman wondered, an alien species were to send a transmission to Earth with the blueprints of a wholly organic organism? A non-mechanical, sentient species designed to reproduce, using Earth’s DNA.

Species ended up being an unlikely mishmash of both morality tale and creature feature, never quite critiquing its inherent horror or fetishes, but never quite as dull as it could have been. It might never hold a candle to Alien or even Terminator 2, but Species built its base of followers for good reason. Henstridge is simultaneously otherworldly and vulnerably human; Madsen is grizzled and unyielding, and Giger’s design is utterly unforgettable. If nothing else, it’s an enduring relic of a time when science fiction could feel both stylized and ridiculous, and of the off-kilter, sometimes-forgotten roles that made the career of actors like Michael Madsen.