"Species"
Latest Reflections from the Guild
Haven't seen this movie yet but Tim O'Lena sent along a few nits so I though I'd start a file!)
Reflections from the Guild
[Note from Phil: I have not verified these but they sounded good to me!]
Tim O'Lena: I don't have the numbers quite right, but you'll get the idea:
Roughly 20 years ago a message was sent from the radio observatory at Aricebo to the star cluster M13 in Hercules. It was a crude message, but decipherable by alien intelligence and gave some idea about the message's senders, US.
The movie starts by saying we received a response to the message. The problem is that M13 is thousands of light-years away. Maybe the response didn't come from M13 ???
At the end of the movie, the alien is destroyed. A hapless rat eats some of the remains and becomes "compromised" i.e., the alien DNA takes over the rat (can you say "sequel"?). This property was seen in the movie "The Thing". The creature in "The Thing" would absorb other creatures and then could assume their form.
If the "Species" alien had this property, and really wanted to take over the planet, then it would have been as dangerous as "The Thing". The whole pretext of the movie is false. The "Species" creature could spread itself quickly, making the influenza virus seem rather pokey.
Murray J.D. Leeder: Just saw this film, as luck would have it. I didn't think it was all that great, an Alien rip-off (with a bit of the remake of The Thing thrown in), undeniably. The direction in the final battle was inept, and the blue-screening was very obvious.
The biggest problem in the film is the question of just how Sil learned English (and to lip-read, no less). She received no education, and speech is certainly not an intrinsic trait (not to mention that she can drive!).
Early on, the Ben Kingsley character notes that Sil can run really fast. How does he know this? She was never let out of the glass cage. Was she running in circles?
In a similar vein, Sil was able to detect that the jerk from the club was diabetic, but doesn't seem to realize the basic fact that human women cannot get pregnant while menstruating (as she was at the time).
Early on, Sil is on a train. A woman goes into the compartment and asks for her ticket. Sil responds by giving her money. The woman doesn't seem to mind. Is there something wrong with this?
How could an empath receive impressions from a video tape?
The scientists really would have been smart to make a real alien (as opposed to a hybrid) first thing.
What was the point of the grate in the lab? I suppose they put it in especially so that if you drop a really important thing, you're not getting it back.
The doctor at the hospital apparently kept the "Don't Give Picard A Straight Answer" syndrome alive. Did he really say over the phone "I've got a weird story"?
Sil fills a number of large containers with gasoline and puts them in the back of a car. When she stops, it looks like no gasoline had splashed out, even though there were no lids.
Later, when she drives her car down the side of the hill, you'd think gasoline would be splashing everywhere.
Sil certainly gave birth quickly (maybe an hour after insemination, at best). But she herself took at least a week to be born. (then again, while she is an alien/human hybrid, her child would be one part alien and three parts human. But why would that speed up gestation?)
That brings up another point. Wouldn't the alien DNA weaken with each successive generation?
That rat gained alien traits solely by consuming alien bits. If that works, why does she need to reproduce traditionally at all?
The way in which this film is most like the remake of The Thing is that when we see Sil in her alien form, she is never the same twice, just like the myriad aliens in that film. This is great for the make-up peoples' creativities, but is it really logical?
Daniel B. Case: I haven't actually seen this movie, but I had one comment from a review I read of it when it was out, as well as a reply to another of the nits someone submitted.
The nit from Gannett News Service's Jack Garner was: apparently, in one scene, the good guys come upon a bloody hotel room with a dead body. Forrest Whitaker's character calls upon his empathic powers
and says, "She's been here." Did we really need an empath to tell us that? (I guess he took lessons from Deanna Troi).
In regard to Sil not picking up on human women not being able to conceive while menstruating, this is not strictly true, as any good birth-control pamphlet will tell you. Under certain circumstances
in some women, menstruation can sometimes begin while the ovum is still fertile (in short, there is no guaranteed "safe" time of the cycle). Also, I'm told that in many other mammals menstruation and
estrus occur pretty much simultaneously ... perhaps it's that way in Sil's species.
And I do think that this would be a pointless way to propagate the
species, as the DNA would get further corrupted every generation.
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Copyright 1996 by Phil Farrand. All Rights Reserved.