Species (1995)

Some years before the start of the movie, SETI actually did get an answer from an alien source. Following some goodwill plans for a clean, inexhaustible energy source (still waiting on that one here), the aliens sent genetic information to be implanted in human egg cells to grow, well, who knows?

The government decided creating a human alien hybrid was worth a crack, so scientists under the leadership of one Fitch (Ben Kingsley) created a girl from the alien DNA plans – because women are more docile, donchaknow. Sil (as a young girl played by Michelle Williams), as they call her, grows up at a rapid tempo and appears to be exceptionally strong and agile. She does seem pleasant enough for someone growing up in a cage, however. Yet when she also develops the disturbing habit of growing H.R. Giger-style mutations under her skin, the decision is made to kill her and end the perhaps ill-advised experiment. Because who could have expected alien DNA to be alien! Obviously, the girl makes a dramatic escape.

On the run, while committing the occasional murder, Sil turns into a rather attractive young woman (Natasha Henstridge), who, as is tradition in certain cultures, goes to Los Angeles to procreate and thereby create who knows how many more aliens.

The government throws together a team consisting of Fitch, assassin style fixer Press (Michael Madsen), molecular biologist Laura (Marg Helgenberger), computer guy Arden (Alfred Molina) and empath Dan (Forest Whitaker) to catch and kill Sil before it is too late for humanity.

Leave it to the 90s to cross the genes of the erotic thriller with gigeresque alien ickiness on a mainstream budget, give it to not always inspired yet highly competent journeyman Roger Donaldson to direct, and make a commercial success out of it.

On the plot level, this is of course pulpy nonsense, but it’s the kind of pulpy nonsense that moves from one hormonal high and one great set piece to the next, has – apart from the badly aged CGI – absolutely great effects and sells every awesome bit of nonsense that comes to its mind with complete seriousness.

Of course, you can read the whole thing as a misogynist tractate about male fear of being seduced into fatherhood but occasionally murderous women (or something of that manner). You can also, if you want to, put a very different reading on the whole thing, and read it as the story of a young woman crushed by forces she has no control over whatsoever – one of them her own biology, the other parents whose only answer to her awakening sexuality and/or difference is to hunt and kill her when she steps out of line.

In any case, on this re-watch, years after I last saw the film, I’ve also realized how good Henstridge’s performance is, quite apart from her willingness to undress. The way she shifts from Sil’s childish naivety into ruthless predator mode, the little notes of regret and desperation – it’s probably more than the film’s script asked of her. Otherwise, the impressive cast doesn’t care they are in a pretty silly kind of science fiction/horror/action exploitation flick, and though there’s little substance to the characters, everyone offers presence, the small actorly notes that bring these kinds of roles to life and a sense of taking their craft seriously.

The older I get – and, perhaps ironically, the less important a generous heaping of nudity becomes to me – the more I’ve learned to appreciate Species. Make of that what you will.

In short: The Marsh (2006)

Claire Holloway (Gabrielle Anwar), a writer of creepy books for children, may be successful, but she’s also suffering from chronic exhaustion and depression. In the last months, recurring nightmares about a frightened little girl, a feral teenage ghost, and a somewhat creepy house have added to the pressure. So when she sees the house from her dreams on TV, she decides to take a Christmas holiday right in the home of her nightmares. Whatever could go wrong?

To nobody’s surprise, the house turns out to be haunted by the children from Claire’s dreams, whose appearances become increasingly more threatening, yet they also hint at a connection between them and Claire’s own, mysterious past. As the film goes on, the ghosts will kill quite a few people connected to that past. On the plus side, the town of Claire’s dubious vacation has its own paranormal investigator, one Geoffrey Hunt (Forest Whitaker), so she won’t have to go through this stuff alone.

Looking at Jordan Baker’s The Marsh on the good old IMDb, I was very surprised this isn’t a TV movie. It does look and feel a lot like one, and not a good one, I hasten to add, but rather the sort of thing made by people totally indifferent to the material they are working with. At the very least, Baker demonstrates a pretty distressing inability to effectively stage even the most basic of horror sequences; if a director can’t even make a simple nightmare sequence with creepy little kid ghosts work, he’s really not a good fit for horror.

Of course, Michael Stokes’s script, with its contrived and derivative murder scenes, its lack of emotional impact even when it talks about childhood trauma, its mechanical plotting, and its general lack of imagination, is the sort of material even a great horror director couldn’t do much with, so blaming Baker is perhaps a little unfair. The script doesn’t even manage to make proper use of the fact that it takes place around Christmas, the second-most ghostly season of the year.

Nobody else involved seems much inspired either: Anwar, while certainly beautiful and at least basically competent in whatever role she’s given isn’t the kind of actress who can conjure up an interesting character out of nothing; the rest of the cast, even the usually wonderful Forest Whitaker, phone things in completely.


There’s an air of disinterest hanging over the whole of The Marsh, as if nobody in front of or behind the camera could actually have been bothered to do more than show up and put as little effort into the film as possible. That, at least they managed.

Three Films Make A Post: Past Passion. Past Terror. Past Murder.

A Little Trip to Heaven (2005): At first, Baltasar Kormákur’s deeply Icelandic (for a film set in the US, at least) movie seems to be a bit of a Fargo-alike, but the longer it runs, the more it becomes clear this has somewhat different sensibilities. It is a bit less concerned with futility than the Coen Brothers film, and even allows Forest Whitaker’s character to take a half successful redemptive action and end up in a curious sort of heaven as his reward. That’s despite the film being just as clear about the darkness in the hearts of men, particularly those who think they are much brighter than they actually are. It just seems to have a bit more compassion with its characters than the Coens sometimes show.

Apart from Whitaker (who is always great even if he flaunts as dubious an accent as he does here), the film also contains fine work by Julia Stiles and a particularly good performance by Jeremy Renner.

Out of Thin Air (2017): Staying in Iceland (though this is a British film), this documentary by Dylan Howitt about two suspected murders in the country and the people the police apparently tortured into believing to have committed them, without any physical evidence (like corpses) whatsoever coming up, seems to me an exemplary piece of true crime filmmaking that tells its tale calmly, not feeling the need to construct or spout outrage because the facts of what happened, and what the audience can suspect happened really don’t need to be made more dramatic than they actually were. It’s not as if the film pretends to have no position on the case, mind you, it is just intelligent enough to assume it doesn’t have to speechify at its audience about its thoughts.

There’s also a quiet, philosophical undercurrent to the endeavour, suggesting a construction of selfhood through human memory that’s all too fragile, leaving self and truth as things always in doubt.

Jane Eyre (2011): Give me the Brontë sisters and their sense of the Gothic and the dramatic over Jane Austen’s ever so ironic tales of the marriage market any day. So it’s no surprise that I enjoyed Cary Joji Fukunaga’s version of Charlotte’s Jane Eyre quite a bit, particular as it is based on a Moira Buffini script that uses the proto-feminist elements of the novel in excellent ways, drawing Jane as a woman not quite fitting into her time because she as a matter of course takes the promises of humanist philosophy as belonging to her as a woman too. And all that with dialogue often very close to the book. I wish the film had done something about the madwoman in the attic, but honestly, I wouldn’t know how to go about that without rewriting half of the book either.

Fukunaga’s direction makes excellent use of bleak but exciting (to me, at least) landscape, period interiors that are claustrophobic or pretty depending on what’s appropriate, never trying to pop the film up too much nor letting get things too BBC stuffy.


Mia Wasikowska – whom I’ve still have to see in anything amounting to a weak performance – is expectedly wonderful, fully realizing the fragilities, the immense strength, the mix of wisdom won through pain and the naivety of the not terribly worldly Jane. Michael Fassbender is fine, too, though the film does focus quite a bit more on Jane – and rightly so.

In short: Arrival (2016)

Warning: A minor degree of spoilers is inevitable in this case

Usually, I have little trouble to entangle a movie adaptation from a superior more thoughtful source and take it for what it is. No such luck for me with Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life”. It’s too bad too, for I suspect if I could, I would find a little bit more to like about the film at hand.

Part of this difficulty certainly lies in the fact that the film’s first half or so is a more than decent movie version of the story, given a glossy Hollywood sheen through impressive camera work, special effects that recommend themselves by never pointing to themselves, and expectedly good acting by Amy Adams, Jeremy Renner and Forest Whitaker. Adams’s Louise’s first visit to the alien spaceship is a fantastic moment that demonstrates the wonder, the awe and the terror of an encounter with the utterly alien. Alas, the aliens become increasingly less alien the longer the film goes on and the further it moves away from Chiang’s novella. In the end, the film’s aliens are just another band of outer space big daddies who have come to wag their fingers at humanity and unify it by force instead of the much more ambiguous and truly alien aliens of the novella to whom we and our ways are as alien as they are to us.

Of course, if the film did otherwise, we couldn’t have a last half hour mostly consisting of lame, clichéd ticking clock scenarios and been there, done that plot events. Keeping with this dumbing down, Villeneuve (or Eric Heisserer’s script) also turns the story’s central philosophical conceit into a plot-practical way to see into the future that is infuriating in its simple-mindedness, falling into the usual trap of expecting a film to play well to the dumbest audience member a Hollywood filmmaker can imagine.

All this does add up to the perfectly respectable kind of science fiction film that can play well with the Academy Awards audience (see also the loathsome Gravity), the sort of film that pretends to be deep and emotional but mostly makes empty gestures to hide how cynically manipulative it is. Which is in general what the big mainstream film awards still prefer from their films, the last bunch of Academy Awards nominees and winners notwithstanding.


Now, I’m not at all against spectacle with a hint of heart as my love for the output of Marvel Studios should prove, but the way Arrival handles these things really sticks in my craw, the series of pretentious gestures that never become anything more than gestures that is the final act, hiding emptiness behind the still fantastic effects and production design and an increasingly schmaltzy score by Jóhann Jóhannsson (who could do so much better), adding up to very little but presented with the grandest gestures possible.