An Unsatisfactory Reboot

I have a standard refrain for this series: you can’t really expect much from a film named Species. The first film was bad, the second film was worse, and while the third film was a step up over those two in many respects, you’d be hard pressed to even call it “good”. Like… it was fine. Watchable even. It certainly gave fans of the series what they likely wanted: hardcore nudity and weird, uncomfortably sexy aliens. And if that’s all you really wanted then all the various films had that, to various degrees, and that’s fine. But you can’t say they’re really good.

So, in a way, I actually had something like hope for the fourth (and, so far, final) film, Species: The Awakening. Like the third film, it was produced direct-to-video, and set to air on Syfy. It was made around the same time, with a similar production, and there was the possibility that even if it wasn’t good it could still be trashy fun. And, for a little while at the start of the film it almost manages to be decent. It has likable characters, an interesting premise, and a clean slate to work from (since the film is, effectively, a spin-off and reboot for the franchise). Unfortunately, after the initial act of the film everything about the movie goes right off the deep end.

The film focuses on Miranda Hollander (Helena Mattsson), an American Professor of Mythology living with her British uncle, Tom Hollander (Ben Cross), in the states. She seems to have her life together, even getting a job offer from Oxford to go overseas and teach at that university. With the support of her uncle she agrees to the job, but before she can get ready for her big move she first has to go on a date with some new guy. And then she doesn’t come home that night and isn’t found until the morning when she’s discovered, naked, out in a field.

Miranda is rushed to the hospital, but by the time Uncle Tom (okay, maybe we won’t call him that again) arrives to take care of her, things have gone horribly wrong. She’s turned into an alien and killed a bunch of people. Tom injects her with stabilizing hormones and gets her out of the hospital, but the incident forces them to go on the run to evade capture. Tom takes her to Mexico to meet up with a guy he knows, Forbes Maguire (Dominic Keating), who supposedly can help her. Why? Because Forbes and Tom designed Miranda, grew her in a lab from a mixture of human and alien DNA, and Forbes might be the only one that knows how to get her alien condition back under control.

In fairness to the movie, I think the basic setup for the film is interesting. We’ve already had three movies in the franchise where some version of the alien queen (twice played by Natasha Henstridge, once by Sunny Mabry) knows what she is, who she is, and runs entirely on hormones and desire to fuck her way, violently, through the human populace. That whole idea was explored to hell and back and a new angle was needed. While a woman that doesn’t know she’s a monster but is forced to learn how to deal with being a monster isn’t exactly new ground in genre film (it’s basically and sci-fi twist on lycanthropy lore) it’s at least a different idea for this franchise to explore, and I liked that.

Unfortunately, once Miranda learns she’s part alien, the film essentially forgets about her as the heroine of her own story. The focus shifts to Tom, his need to save her, his desire to set things right, and the things he has to do to heal her. Most of the film finds Miranda sitting in a lab, waiting for Tom to do something while he and Forbes debate the finer points of alien sexuality and genetic engineering. Miranda stops being the heroine and, eventually, becomes a villain for the films series to focus us because, of course, we still eventually have to get to an alien queen who wants to fuck her way, violently, through the human populace. That’s this series’ default stance, sadly.

Instead of going this route, which is so formulaic it’s practically on rails the whole time, the film should have instead focused on Miranda and what she would have to do to stay alive. The alien DNA has gotten old, aging her and bringing her to the brink of death. In the film that means that Tom and Forbes eventually “reboot” her DNA, which turns her into the alien queen, and she wanders off on pure instinct. But if instead the film had let her keep her humanity while also feeling urges and drives that she had to fight to control, that would have made for a more interesting character study for her.

That kind of character is more lycanthrope or vampire, really. She might have had a need to hunt, to fuck and then kill her prey so she could stay alive and intelligent. If she waited too long she’s become an alien zombie powered by nothing but drive until she eventually fucked and killed someone and regained herself. She could have learned what she had to do, gone through the stages of grief over what she was doing to stay alive, maybe even had a bout of suicidal thoughts. We could have been there with her to see her grow and change and then, whether she killed herself to save humanity, or killed her uncle and committed to being the monster, at least that’s an arc that treats the character authentically.

But now, we have to focus on Tom and, quite frankly, Tom is boring. His story happened decades ago, back when Miranda was first made. Since then he’s just been a side character to her story, watching her grow and develop but otherwise not being the driving factor of her life. He has one drive, to save Miranda, but it’s not really a character arc. He doesn’t grow or change or learn anything from this adventure. He’s a glorified extra that, for some reason, the film keeps focusing on instead of putting its eyes on the interesting character at the center of it all.

Although focusing on Tom isn’t the only bad decision the film makes. This movie is absolutely littered with terrible ideas, half baked plot threads, characters that don’t really belong in the movie, and dialogue that makes no sense. One key moment comes after Miranda, now an alien queen, wanders off and Tom and Forbes get into a spat. mForbes goes from saying, “she’s fine, nothing has changed,” to, “we have to kill her because there’s no way to save her,” to, “well, sure, saving her isn’t that hard,” and this all happens in one minute of dialogue. It’s tonal whiplash, and that kind of writing permeates the entire film. Scenes start, characters are introduced, weird things happen, and then none of it is remarked on again, over and over until the film eventually peters out to some kind of ending.

And honestly, if all you’re here to see is the wanton violence and gratuitous nudity (which, you made it this far into the series so we’re not going to judge you if that’s the case), this film doesn’t even provide that. There’s barely any alien action, not until almost the end of the film, and what bits of alien effects we do get are all rendered in the worst, most laughable CGI for the series yet. And the film seems almost embarrassed to be a sexy alien softcore film. Plenty of times the film obscures or covers up its nudity, as if the actresses have “no nudity” clauses in their contracts. And yet other times the stars are wandering around nude like it’s no big deal. I’m not sure what the reasoning was (since this film was released direct to video and could have any rating it wanted, in effect) but the fact that even here, in the one aspect you expect a stupid Species film to commit, this film just can’t.

Everything put together adds up to, quite frankly, the worst Species film I’ve seen yet. It shouldn’t be that hard to make one of these films since all you really need is a blond with a very loose fashion sense who isn’t easily embarrassed, and some monster effects and goop to splash around. You could probably pull in just about anyone and they’d come up with a better story on short notice than what we got in Species: The Awakening. I guess we should all be glad the film series stopped here because I just don’t want to know how much worse it could have gotten.