Monster Movie Monday: Species: The Awakening (2007)
Review Overview
Featured creature
4Change of direction
5Special effects
4Matthew Turner | On 21, Aug 2023
Director: Nick Lyon
Cast: Ben Cross, Helena Mattsson, Dominic Keating, Marlene Favela
Certificate: 16+
In the mood for a creature feature? Amazon Prime has a veritable menagerie of monster movies, so we’re working our way through them, one killer beastie at a time. Welcome to Monster Movie Mondays.
Directed by Nick Lyon, the fourth and final movie in the Species franchise is a standalone story and the first in the series that does not feature Natasha Henstridge. Like its predecessor, Species III, it premiered on the SyFy Channel, before going straight to DVD.
Ben Cross stars as museum employee Tom Hollander (which is a bit like naming your lead character Hugh Grant), who has been secretly raising beautiful human-alien DNA hybrid Miranda (Helena Mattsson) as his niece. When Miranda unwittingly reverts to her alien form and kills dozens of people in a hospital, Tom tells her the truth and together they travel to Mexico, in search of Tom’s former collaborator, Forbes (Dominic Keating).
Once in Mexico, Forbes tells Tom that Miranda is reaching the end of her life cycle, and will need an injection of fresh human DNA to survive. However, the procedure backfires and awakens Miranda’s deadly sexual predator side, essentially turning her into the version of the character the audience has been expecting all along.
In fairness to Species: The Awakening, the film does at least revert to the original HR Giger designs for the creature, after audiences (such as they were) reacted poorly to the redesign in Species III. Unfortunately, by 2007, when The Awakening was produced, cheap CGI was clearly an option, so several of the special effects are of distinctly shoddy quality. To that end, there’s an over-reliance on the creature’s extended tongue as a killing device, and it never looks good.
That said, there are some interesting new elements in The Awakening, even if the script never seems to know what to do with them. A particular case in point involves Tom’s discovery of a multitude of failed human-alien DNA hybrids, created by Forbes. This allows for more variety in the creature department, including a monster that directly rips off Giger’s designs for Alien even further, complete with extending jaws. However, all the creatures in question promptly disappear – a promising plot development that goes precisely nowhere.
The script does pick up on a discarded plot development from the previous movie, revisiting the nonsensical idea that Miranda can absorb an entire book just by touching it. Although, somewhat disappointingly, the only use the script can find for that particular skillset involves Miranda using the same ability to open a combination lock.
The script’s biggest mistake is that it mistakenly centres Tom as the main character, rather than Miranda. It’s a decision that only pays off once, when Tom has to go out and find a human victim for the DNA injection, a horror reference the film makes explicit by name-dropping Doctor Frankenstein a few scenes earlier. However, the decision ultimately hurts the film, because you quickly realise how much better the film would have been if Tom had been less sympathetic, and the story was about Miranda discovering her true self having been lied to her whole life by the “uncle” she trusted. The scene where Tom tells her the truth about herself is in the film, but it lacks the emotional impact it should have had.
The performances are fine. Cross isn’t a particularly appealing male lead, but he at least manages to be convincingly straight-faced throughout. Mattsson, in turn, has a sweetness that works well for the first half of the film, but her eventual transformation into evil seductress happens far too late in the running time, depriving audiences of the sort of thing they were probably expecting.
As for Keating, his performance is clearly a little more tongue-in-cheek, though his wandering accent doesn’t do him – or the audience – any favours. On the plus side, there’s strong support from Marlene Favela as Azura, the alien-human hybrid who’s both Forbes’ assistant and his lover.
There are dashes of invention in the movie, such as the idea that Forbes makes an off-the-books living by cloning dead animals and relatives for bereaved customers, but those ideas are never allowed to properly flourish. Similarly, the film often shoots itself in the foot with regard to its own intentions – for example, at one point Miranda steals a red dress (the one in the poster) from a singer in a nightclub, but that dress is never shown in decent lighting after that, ruining the entire point of its existence.
There are other problems too, including a number of amusingly terrible moments, such as a cut from Miranda killing someone to her having a cup of tea afterwards. If that’s an intentional laugh, then that blackly comic tone is largely absent in the rest of the film.
Sadly, the climax is also disappointing, partly because it’s hard to tell who’s who in the final battle, and partly because the script hasn’t earned the emotional moment it’s clearly aiming for, another problem that could have been at least partially fixed by making Miranda the central focus rather than Tom.