Species (1995) on Netflix
A message from space brings alien DNA and instructions for splicing it into human genes. The hybrid it produces, Sil, escapes the lab and grows fast. A government team hunts her.
- Netflix3.1/5
- IMDb5.9/1091,649 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes42%
Trailer
Plot summary
Earth's scientists send transmissions into space describing the planet and its inhabitants, hoping to find other life. A reply comes from an alien source: a sample of alien DNA and instructions for splicing it with human DNA. Xavier Fitch leads a government team that commissions an experiment: a female human-alien hybrid expected to be docile and controllable. The result is a girl codenamed Sil, who looks human and reaches the age of twelve within three months. Judged dangerous after violent outbursts while she sleeps, she is to be killed with cyanide gas. Sil breaks out of containment and escapes. Fearing that she might breed with human men, the authorities assemble a team of scientists and agents to track her down.
Cast
- Scott McKennaas Train Hobo
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Species (1995)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Dennis Feldman got the idea in 1987 after reading an Arthur C. Clarke article on how unlikely it is that any alien ship could ever reach Earth. He decided it was unsophisticated for aliens to arrive in what he called a big tin can, and that contact would come as information instead.
- The creature's name is three letters long for a reason: Feldman had meant to make an acronym of it, then settled on plain Sil once he learned that the codons of the genetic code are written in groups of three letters.
- H.R. Giger drew far more transformation stages for Sil than the film used, and only the final one reached the screen: a body he described as transparent outside and black inside, like glass with carbon in it. Steve Johnson's company XFX built the translucent skin using methods it had worked out for the creatures in The Abyss.
- Richard Edlund's Boss Film Studios used one of the earliest forms of motion capture for the digital shots, driving a computer Sil from a two-foot electric puppet fitted with sensors. Work that would once have taken up to three weeks with practical effects was finished in a day.
- Production designer John Muto built the sewer maze out of structural steel, rod, plaster and concrete so it could survive the fire effects, made the tunnels wider and taller than real sewers, and modeled them on the La Brea Tar Pits so they would suit a creature from another planet.
- The 17.1 million dollars the film took in its first weekend was the biggest opening MGM had ever had at that point, beaten in the charts that week only by Apollo 13.
