Forest Whitaker’s “Empath” in Species: Peak ’90s Weirdness

Late actor Michael Madsen, who passed away earlier this month, has been remembered as the talented actor behind some of cinema’s grittiest, most beloved roles (Reservoir Dogs, Kill Bill, Donnie Brasco), but rarely did these tributes mention one of his more uncharacteristic performances—that of the taciturn black ops mercenary on the hunt for a deadly half-human/half-alien hybrid in the 1995 sci-fi thriller Species, which turns 30 this year.

Directed by Roger Donaldson (No Way Out, The Bounty), Species was a weird mix of horror, action, and soft sci-fi; it begins with the U.S. government receiving two transmissions from outer space, one of which contains data on an innovative new fuel source and the other of which contains blueprints on how to splice alien DNA and human DNA. The government does the obvious and orders the experiment to go ahead under the watch of Dr. Xavier Fitch (Ben Kingsley). He and his team create the hybrid Sil (Michelle Williams in her early years), and what should have been a docile organism becomes something far more sinister.

Sil grows rapidly, developing the appearance of a 12-year-old in just a few months. But something’s not right. She suffers from violent nightmares, and the evidence points to the fact that Sil is, in fact, not all that “docile” or “controllable” as first thought. Fitch makes the call to end the project by releasing cyanide into her cell, but Sil escapes—hence the film’s central chase.

To find Sil, Fitch recruits a team of specialists that includes Madsen’s Preston Lennox, a no-nonsense mercenary; Dr. Laura Baker (Marg Helgenberger), a molecular biologist; Dr. Stephen Arden (Alfred Molina), an anthropologist; and Dan Smithson (Forest Whitaker), a brooding, sensitive empath who’s able to psychically feel what Sil is feeling. This killer team traverses the country (eventually ending up in Los Angeles) to hunt down Sil, now full-grown and played by Natasha Henstridge, who has begun to hunt and mate in an attempt to reproduce. She’s intelligent and adaptable, but also ruled by primal, lethal instinct. Bodies pile up (a train tramp, a nightclub victim, a doomed love interest), and the team scrambles to stop her before she produces offspring that could begin replicating just as quickly.

A Beautiful Monster Designed to Entice and Murder

One of the most remarkable elements of Species was, of course, the creature design. Legendary surrealist artist H.R. Giger (best known for designing the xenomorph from Alien) was tapped to bring Sil into the world, with the directive of making her “an aesthetic warrior, also sensual and deadly.” The result was striking to say the least. Sil’s final form (after the aforementioned transformation cocoon) was described as having translucent skin with “a glass body but with carbon inside.”

Giger would have designed different stages in the alien-human hybrid’s evolution (species? ), but he was constrained by budget and time and was able to make only two different versions (the cocoon and the maternal alien form at the end). Ultimately, he wasn’t pleased with the final product; his primary gripe was that Species was too much like his Alien work, from the creature’s “punching tongue” to the famous birth scene, which he considered similar to the xenomorph’s “chestburster” scene in Alien. He went so far as to interfere with the production to have Sil killed with a bullet to the head as opposed to the flame-throwers he was originally promised; as he saw it, the latter was too similar to scenes in Alien 3 and Terminator 2.

Species Was Less Than Kind to Critics

Despite its commercial success and surprisingly intriguing visuals, Species wasn’t well-received by critics. Dialogue was a struggle, and many of the characters come off as one-note or totally expendable. Kingsley as Fitch is amoral and more than a little unbelievable, while Whitaker’s empathy mostly serves as an exposition-spouting spectator. Bioethics, alien contact, maternal instinct: The film grapples with some interesting themes but never really delves into the implications of the material.

But the film also has a strange magnetism: an uneven mixture of soft science fiction and ’90s erotic horror. Screenwriter Feldman was inspired to write the script by an article by Arthur C. Clarke in which he suggested that the one reason extraterrestrials may never make it to Earth is that the universe is so big, and the probability of faster-than-light travel so infinitesimal, that it’s all but impossible. (Clarke’s suggested timeframe? A trillion years.) What if, Feldman wondered, aliens contacted Earth not with spaceships but with blueprints for something organic? An invasive, sentient species built out of Earth’s DNA?

Species ultimately felt like both a cautionary tale (don’t combine human and alien DNA!) and a ’90s creature feature. It will never have the bona fides of Alien or The Terminator, but it also created a cult following of its own—and for a good reason. Henstridge is inhumanly otherworldly; Madsen is a welcome grizzled presence; and Giger’s creature design is unforgettable. Between the movie’s style, script, and performances, Species remains a ’90s sci-fi curiosity worth watching today.

So much has changed in 30 years; Species itself can serve as a time capsule for what style-heavy sci-fi looked like at a time when style sometimes trumped substance—and for the unexpected, unforgettable roles actors like Michael Madsen would take along the way.