And then other guys meet her standards, and soon there is the prospect of lots of little Sils. What happens to him shouldn't happen to a bug on a windshield. As the search team follows her trail, the empathist picks up signals that she rejected one guy because he did not have, perhaps, the right genes. She checks into a motel, asks the clerk "Where can I find a man?" and picks up the first of her victims in a bar. The alien, named Sil, is a quick learner. Instead, Kingsley gathers Press ( Michael Madsen), a hired killer for the government Dan ( Forest Whitaker), an "empathist" who can sense what happened in places Arden ( Alfred Molina), an anthropologist, and Laura ( Marg Helgenberger), a molecular biologist. Because the existence of the monster must remain a secret, a general alert is delayed. (The ability to instantly change one's physical composition is, I believe, in violation of the laws of physics, but "Species" breaks every law but the law of diminishing returns.) Ben Kingsley, that invaluable actor, does what he can with the lead role of Fitch, the scientist leading a team chasing the escaped alien. But, no, she stays at the sex-bomb stage for the rest of the film, except when morphing into a gruesome monster.
Pure logic would suggest that if she can change from a 10-year-old into a 21-year-old almost overnight, she should die of old age before the movie ends. We know this because the movie spends a good deal of time having her take off her brassiere while seducing her victims in hot tubs, because she wants to mate. One attribute of the creature is its rapid growth rate.Īfter only a few days she looks like a 10-year-old, and by the next time we see her, she has matured into a sexy blond ( Natasha Henstridge) who could star in the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue anytime. In the opening scene, they are trying to gas her to death. Scientists in a secret government lab carry out the experiment, which produces a pretty little girl. Thus a creature might be born that is both human and alien - able to live here, but with attributes of the other species. "Species," directed by Roger Donaldson from a screenplay by Dennis Feldman, begins with an interesting premise: Radio telescopes pick up signals from space that, when decoded, include a formula for a DNA string thatcan be combined with our own. Mainstream Hollywood is so terrified of intelligent human characters that it's no wonder they don't want aliens who are even smarter than the humans: Hey, dude, you don't pay for a ticket just to hear words you don't understand.Īnd there's a kind of smugness in the assumption that we are at the top of the evolutionary ladder that other species, even if they do manage to travel to Earth, will look and behave like an explosion at the special-effects factory. For every rare film like " 2001: A Space Odyssey" or " Close Encounters of the Third Kind" with a sense of wonder about the vastness of creation, there are a dozen like this, which are basically just versions of " Friday the 13th" in which Jason is a bug-eyed monster. Like the " Alien" movies and many others, it is founded on a fear of another species, and the assumption that extraterrestrials basically want to eat us. How do they travel through space? By jumping out from behind one star after another? "Species" is the latest movie to explore this depressing vision. Their civilizations must be wonderfully advanced, and yet, when we finally encounter them, what do we get? Disgusting, slimy morph-creatures with rows of evil teeth, whose greatest cultural achievement is jumping out at people from behind things. According to the movies, out there in space, untold light years from Earth, exist many alien species with the ability to travel between the stars and send messages across the universe.