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Species More at IMDbPro »

2 out of 4 people found the following review useful:
Wow, Natasha Henstridge was literally born naked into the movies., 7 December 2004

Author: Michael DeZubiria (miked32@hotmail.com) from Luoyang, China

Species starts out with a great premise. Scientists receive radio signals from outer space that, when decoded, include an alien form of DNA and instructions for combining it with human DNA, resulting in attractive human creatures that have attributes of the alien species. In the opening scene of the movie, scientists are trying to gas a cute little blonde girl to death, having learned that this particular alien species is far more than we can handle and, my god, making it female didn't make it more docile and controllable after all. I find the beginning premise fascinating to no end, but probably because I always forget that such story lines are dreamed up by people who have no more clue about what's out there than I do, so I'm probably not going to learn anything. That's why movies like this tend to go downhill in the second half.

One of the most startling characteristics of this new species is its rapid growth rate. The subject has grown to the size and appearance of a 10-year-old girl after only a few days, and then before long into the statuesque form of Natasha Henstridge not long after. At this point, still well within the confines of the first act, it may become apparent that, if she has grown to maturity almost immediately, you might think she would grow into an old woman and die of old age before the week is out. Later in the movie you may also wonder how a few cells can grow into a bubbling mass of organic matter before the very eyes of shocked and frightened scientists with no nourishment whatsoever. What is being metabolized to allow it to grow like that?

No matter. It's strange that the movie started off with such an interesting premise, a radio signal from a clearly intelligent alien species, and then all of a sudden we realize that that intelligent species is nothing but another slimy Hollywood alien. Try to imagine this alien, in its own form, sitting down to compose a radio signal including instructions for how to combine two types of DNA, and you have the chink in this movie's already thin armor.

Forest Whitaker is great as the movie's resident psychic, I don't know why, he just fits roles like that really well. He's got one of those faces that always seems to be deep in thought, and is clearly not someone who easily fits in with the mainstream. He's very good at conveying emotion, from extreme sadness to gleeful happiness, and interestingly one of his best scenes is one in which he's drunk. Alfred Molina is also very good as the anthropologist, a very different role from the one he may now be better known for in Spiderman 2.

There is a young actor named Michelle Williams who gives a wonderful performance as Sil, the human form of the alien, as a young girl, effectively portraying her fear of her sterile surroundings. Once she turns into the blonde bombshell that is Natasha Henstridge, the majority of the rest of the film is concerned with her burning desire to mate and create babies and with everyone else's growing desire to stop her before they lose containment even more completely.

One thing that I found interesting about the movie was the locations. It was filmed mostly on location in Hollywood and the Santa Monica area, which is where I live, so it was interesting to see all of these street locations that I know so well. I found it a bit odd, though, that in one scene Michael Madsen's character reads Dr. Baker's (his romantic interest in the film) home address, which is a real address in Simi Valley. My grandparents live in Simi Valley, and over the Thanksgiving holiday this year I decided to ride my bike by the house that was mentioned in the movie. It's just some house, in case you were wondering, but the address is real.

There are some strange scenes in the movie, such as the one where they find the crashed car that Sil was in, find the tip of one of her thumbs in the car, and assume that she's dead. What do they figure happened to the rest of her body? Vaporized? There is some great poetic justice, you might say, in her choice of a mate, but my favorite part of the movie was the part at the end when the woman wonders which half of Sil, the human or the alien, was the predatory half. Pretty interesting question about humanity, although a bit jarring to have come from what is at best a second rate science fiction film.

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