Species was a movie which I had never really intended to see, I certainly wasn't going to go out of my way to track it down or spend my hard earned cash to find after reading some of the disparaging reviews it got aqfter its initial release. The plot sounds rather interesting, but the final execution, dumb in the extreme.

Scientists have been trying to communicate with aliens for years, sending messages up into space and not getting nay reply - until now. They start receiving messages back, and in one comes a coded message for some alien DNA. Well of course, being scientists, the first thing they do is inject this alien DNA into a human egg and grow a creature from it. This new breed looks human, but grows at a rapid pace so that within a matter of days it is a 7 year old child etc. It also has telepathic powers and super strength..and ummm all those other alien cliche type things, and the head of the research team soon realises that they can not control it should it become fully grown. He orders her gased, but of course, being dumb old scientists(and they are portrayed as REALLY dumb here) they let her see the gasing equipment being brought into her chamber(she is kept in a glass tank)...and naturally breaks free and escape the research facility(quelle surprise). Now we have an alien lifeform on the loose which we know little about and which it turns out has an insatiable desire to mate - but only with the perfect partner(no diabetes, drug addiction etc.) and therefore she leaves a trail of death in her wake...obviously just a simple "nah, I don't like you" isn't good enough. She is also still maturing at an accelerated rate and is now a beautiful young woman(who incidentally spends most of the movie bare chested...cheap trick, probably tripled the sales) and the pursuing 'crack' team no longer know what she looks like. Thinks are looking better all the time...NOT. Well our particular group of not too bright alien hunters incl
ude an assassin who assassinates nothing, an anthropologist who is about as much use as a chocolate fireguard and an empath...who ummm...well y'know. Basically the movie descends into a bunch of chase scenes as our heroes try to track down the marauding alien...

Its hard to find much to actually like about this movie because everything it tries to do it does so heavy handedly and so damn obviously that it fails to pull it off. For example, get a pretty girl, have her topless or having sex for most of the movie(when she isn't killing people), double your viewers by this cynical ploy but make it so damn obvious that this was your intention that its annoying all the way through. There is no intelligent filmmaking here and we are constantly demanded to suspend our disbelief to compensate for this. It gets tiresome after a while. We are truly meant to believe that these scientists are dumb enough to inject alien DNA into an embryo without studying it first. That they will then keep the new creature in such a weakly protected environment. That the assembled team of 'experts' etc can be so lame in their duties...etc. etc. Its just completely crap.

The casting is poor, none with the ability to act their way out of a paper bag, are not developed AT ALL throughout the story and basically look like alien food and space-fillers throughout. They are not helped(although by the look of them I don't think anything would have made them look 'good') by an extremely weak scipt which although something of the norm in this kind of picture(sadly!) doesn't usually plumb such depths. When a character comes across a room covered in blood and gore and offers a line something along the lines of "something bad happened here" as their expert opinion, then you know you are in trouble scriptwise - expect this sort of thing throughout. Effects are quite good though, although most of the action is filmed at a fast pace so you never really
get to see the alien properly(see that its a guy in a rubber alien suit?), so you can't really complain there I suppose.

It just all feels so fake, so unbelievable and fails to draw you into its storytelling web or provide you will enough thrills and spills to make you forget about how weak everything else is. In short it fails to deliver an enjoyable movie experience and adds itself to the long list of sci-fi movies which fail to capture the imagination...few do it can be argued, but at least most try to do something other than give us a cheap soft-porn alien movie. Its badly acted, badly scripted, badly cast, has weak action scenes, not very special effects and a plot so full of holes that it could double up as collander. Why would you want to watch this then? Well, like I said, the movie obviously shipped a number of copies thanks to the numerous scenes with Natasha Henstridge in hell full naked glory...so if this sounds like a good reason to watch a movie to you then feel free...you are obviously not alone in this. For the rest of us, I really can't see any reason to recommend this unless you are a real avid sci-fi fan in need of another fix.