“More docile and controllable, huh? I guess you guys don’t get out much.”
If a film exists that’s more existentially terrifying than 1995’s sci-fi horror Species to the popcorn muscled clowns and ungroomed pseudoscientists who make up the tentpoles to the manosphere, beleaguered by mommy issues as they are, studio genre cinema hasn’t produced it yet.
On the surface, a movie that promises its audience copious shots of Natasha Henstridge, fresh-faced at just 21 years old, bare-chested and hot to trot with strange men sounds an awful lot like porn for the manosphere’s star creeps and crooks; Henstridge’s character seems to be their feminine ideal, a young woman eager for a hot fuck with the first man she bumps into at cacophonous, gaudy nightclubs, or hospital emergency rooms. Bad news for rookies in the misogyny game, though: it’s a trap! Turns out all this nubile creature wants is to get pregnant and ruin your life. Myron Gaines, who will go down in history as a man who won’t go down, isn’t falling for that. Neither are the unsettling number of Andrews who fatten their wallets by braying like jackasses at vulnerable men: Schulz, Wilson, Tate. (Author’s note: this is why I’m an Andy. I do not associate with these scumfuck weirdos.)
30 years after its release, Species remains the exact same stilted conundrum critics received it as in 1995. The simple premise hinges on the scientific discovery of dual alien transmissions, one containing a formula for creating limitless clean-burning fuel, the other for splicing this seemingly friendly extraterrestrial race’s DNA with human DNA; the result of the latter experiment is Sil, played by Henstridge as an adult, and Michelle Williams as an adolescent. After the film’s opening sequence, where operation head Fitch (Ben Kingsley, a template for Jeff Bezos’ future “look”) reluctantly orders Sil’s execution, and Sil reacts by busting out of captivity and fleeing into the night, a crew is assembled for her recapture: empath Dan Smithson (Forest Whitaker), anthropologist Stephen Arden (Alfred Molina), molecular biologist Laura Baker (Marg Helgenberger), and black ops cleaner Preston Lennox (Michael Madsen, RIP).
It’s Lennox who recites the quoted jape about women’s nature, his response to Fitch’s admission that he and his team chose to “make it female,” under the assumption that a girl would be easier to handle than a boy. (Speaking as a parent to two daughters: Fitch is an idiot.) Lennox’s one-liner is colorful in its own way; he doesn’t elaborate, but based on his character’s attitude and behavior, it’s a simple conclusion to make that he isn’t speaking from a place of enlightenment about female behavior, but the opposite end of the horseshoe from Fitch. Fitch believes the myth that women are naturally submissive; Lennox expresses the disgruntled resentment that they are, in fact, difficult, which he quite likely knows from experience interacting with them as a self-determined loner.
“You want to believe that nothing affects you, that you’re not afraid of anything,” Smithson tells Lennox, leaning in with a wry, knowing smile in an exchange minutes earlier. Lennox is bemused by Smithson’s presence in their midst, and smugly asks for a demonstration of his gift for reading people. “But you’re curious, just like the rest of us.” Maybe Lennox isn’t a caveman. Maybe he’s just a scared one, who puts up a traditional front of macho bravado to hide his insecurities. Given Smithson’s hit rate on his “gift,” which Species treats like a superpower rather than as a state of heightened emotional attunement, and given how Madsen plays Lennox’s reaction–by breaking eye contact with Whitaker and tilting his head, mouth slightly agape–we get the impression that he has Lennox pegged.
Species’ script, from writer Dennis Feldman, doesn’t explore the crevices in Lennox’s soul and psyche; he’s just a cool tough guy who risks his life to save the day, and bangs a scientist. (Baker is his love interest, though really, he’s the object of her desire to start.) Frankly, the movie, under Roger Donaldson’s direction, doesn’t explore much of anything at all, even after introducing heaps of nifty ideas in its first act. You’d think, for instance, that Sil would have rancor for Baker as her “sexual competition”–Smithson’s words for the corpse Sil leaves in the women’s bathroom at a dance hall, which looks like the aftermath of a Mortal Kombat fatality. (“She’s pretty hard on the competition,” Lennox quips. That Lennox! Always good for tasteless gags.) Baker gets on her knees for Lennox and yanks off his briefs, for Christ’s sake, all while Sil listens from the hotel room next to theirs; and yet, she pointedly does not yank out Baker’s spine and leave her limp carcass on the floor, a glove puppet absent a hand.
Pervy eavesdropper she may be, but more than that, Sil embodies everything evil the manosphere of 2025 thinks about women: she is a “brainless primate” seeking out men with premium genes for reproductive purposes; it’s why she changes her mind about the sleazy douchebag she leaves the club with after she, unbeknownst to him, kills that one unsuspecting woman in a toilet stall. Turns out, he’s a diabetic. Bad genes. (She kills him, too, but that’s his own damn fault for ignoring her when she rejects him.) Beneath her exquisite exterior beauty–and Henstridge, then and now, is indeed a truly beautiful human being–lies a literal inhuman monster, tentacular and terrible, and who viewers don’t see enough of, which is a shame given that her design was a product of H.R. Giger himself. (Also a shame: the amount of CGI used to facilitate her presence, which looks awful today and didn’t look much better in the ’90s.)
Grant that the manosphere scores an accidental point here, in that Sil is monstrous. Species doesn’t play a morally gray angle; there are no necessary ethical questions to raise about whether Sil should be allowed to follow her nature, because her nature is to breed, for her brood to breed, und so weiter und so fort. Her propagation begets our extinction. Remove the text to subtext and allegory, though, and Sil, who can’t be controlled, and who, in her prepubescent stage, can kill a man with a single punch, is a nightmare representation of female dominance over males, the antithesis to all of the claptrap and bullshit manosphere influencers espouse about women’s roles in the workforce–namely that they don’t belong, because that’s the way it’s always been, since the oldest days of civilization.
They’re wrong, of course. Patrilocal cultural norms and gender essentialist expectations first began to slowly materialize in the Agricultural Revolution, and were only fully codified in society by around the Victorian era. But guys like Wilson–dominant, high value guys who can’t open pickle jars unassisted–won’t let the historical record get in the way of a good swindle, or harsh their anti-feminist buzz. They also probably think Species is a metaphor to validate their warped belief structure, because bigoted people will intentionally misread horror, or any genre, to suit their bigotry. For what it’s worth, Sil is dangerous. She doesn’t care about politics or cultural mores. She cares about her reproductive cycle, and she will do anything, including kidnapping and indirectly killing a woman as part of her ploy to evade Fitch, Lennox, Baker, Smithson, and Arden. But in a choice between Sil and the manosphere, we should all stick with Sil. Don’t root for the misogynists. Root for the thing that goes “bump” in the night while Andrew Tate dreams of choosing his imaginary daughter’s mate.
Bostonian culture journalist Andy Crump covers the movies, beer, music, and being a dad for way too many outlets, perhaps even yours. He has contributed to Paste since 2013. You can find his collected work at his personal blog. He’s composed of roughly 65% craft beer.