The real-life S.E.T.I. (search for extraterrestrial intelligence) projects have for decades been sending out engraved invitations to any advanced life forms out there in the galaxy to come and invade the Earth. It’s a bit like sending out cards to every known burglar in the country letting them know that as far as you’re concerned your home is their home.
In this movie in 1993 an alien civilisation responds to these messages. The response is in the form of instructions on how to do some really cool genetic manipulations. Naturally scientists, led by Xavier Fitch (Ben Kingsley), decide to try out these experiments. What could go wrong? If you can’t trust aliens from an unknown extraterrestrial civilisation on an unknown planet who can you trust? The U.S. Government naturally funds the project.
The result of the project is a little girl who becomes known as Sil. She looks like any normal twelve-year-old girl which is a bit concerning since she’s only a few months old. Sil also seems to be faster and more powerful than a normal twelve-year-old girl. The scientists are afraid of her. When they get really afraid of her they decide to kill her. They describe it as “terminating the project” which sounds so much nicer than murdering a child.
Sil’s execution by lethal gas is the opening scene of the movie but Sil escapes. Now she must be hunted down and destroyed. That proves to be quite a challenge.
Fitch assembles a team of four for the hunt. There are two scientists, Dr Stephen Arden (Alfred Molina) and Dr Laura Baker (Marg Helgenberger). There’s Dan (Forest Whitaker), an unstable empath who seems to have various extra-sensory power. And there’s a government assassin, Preston Lennox (Michael Madsen).
Sil has grown up fast. She now looks like a gorgeous 20-year-old blonde woman (and is now played by Natasha Henstridge). Sil is confused but she has a strong survival instinct and she’s half-human while the other half is an alien predator.
Sil also has a strong instinct to reproduce. That’s what really scares Fitch. He has no idea how many offspring she can produce and how quickly she can do it. She has to be destroyed before she can breed.
This is a movie that you need to think about. On the surface it’s a monster movie with government agents hunting down a monster from outer space. But the more you think about it the more nuanced it becomes. Sil is not necessarily an evil monster as such, and her hunters are perhaps not quite the uncomplicated good guys they seem to be.
It’s important to note that the government scientists start trying to kill Sil before she ever tries to kill anyone. And although she ends up killing lots of people from her point of view she is killing in self-defence. Sometimes her ideas of self-defence are a little pro-active - she sometimes kills people who are merely potential threats. But to her they are very real potential threats. And the decision to hunt her down and destroy her is also made before she has killed anybody.
She just scares these scientists a lot, so the safest thing is to kill her.
Sil is only half-human. Her non-human half is animal-like, driven purely by the natural instinct to survive and to reproduce. Expecting moral judgments from her is like expecting a lion to agonise over the ethical implications of eating zebras, or expecting a tigress to consider the moral dimensions of killing in order to protect her cubs.
Fitch is a character with a little bit of depth. He thinks of himself as a rational man whose mind is never clouded by emotion, a man capable of taking tough decisions. He is however not as sure of himself as he seems to be. He cries when he orders Sil’s execution. He is also a lot more frightened than he’ll admit, and he’s also aware that he has screwed up pretty badly. Ben Kingley does a pretty good in the role, giving us hints that Fitch is only just holding himself together.
When judging Natasha Henstridge’s performance you have to remember that her character is not a woman. She is only half-human, and her human half is both intelligent and child-like. And totally unsocialised. She has to come across as not quit human and Miss Henstridge does a fine job of getting that across.
H.R. Giger did the monster design work, in his characteristic amazing style.
Species is an interestingly deceptive movie. You can enjoy it as a straight-out monster-hunting movie but there’s some subtlety and ambiguity there if you care to look for them. This is a monster who is very scared. I liked this movie a great deal. Highly recommended.
Species looks terrific on Blu-Ray.
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