iron
maidens
species
first knight |
director
Roger Donaldson
screenwriter
Dennis Feldman
producers
Dennis Feldman
Frank Mancuso Jr.
cinematographer
Andrzej Bartkowiak
music
Christopher Young
editor
Conrad Buff IV
cast
Ben Kingsley (Xavier Fitch)
Michael Madsen (Preston Lennox)
Alfred Molina (Dr. Stephen Arden)
Forest Whitaker (Dan Smithson)
Marg Helgenberger (Dr. Laura Baker)
Natasha Henstridge (Sil)
Michelle Williams (Young Sil)
mpaa rating: R
running
time: 108m
u.s.
release: 7/7/95
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
official
website
director
Jerry Zucker
screenwriter
William Nicholson
story by
Lorne Cameron
David Hoselton
William Nicholson
producers
Hunt Lowry
Jerry Zucker
cinematographer
Adam Greenberg
music
Jerry Goldsmith
editor
Walter Murch
cast
Sean Connery (King Arthur)
Richard Gere (Lancelot)
Julia Ormond (Guinevere)
Ben Cross (Prince Malagant)
Liam Cunningham (Agravaine)
Christopher Villiers (Sir Kay)
John Gielgud (Oswald)
Alexis Denisof (Sir Gaheris)
mpaa rating: PG-13
running
time: 134m
u.s.
release: 7/7/95
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
official website
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Heterosexual male reviewers
may dread writing about movies like Species as much as
they probably enjoy watching them. How does one suggest, without
sounding sexist, that a lead actress (in this case, newcomer
Natasha Henstridge) who has been cast solely because she has
a nice body and doesn't mind showing it is the best reason to
see the movie? To answer my own question: There is no
way, so what the hell. As "Sil," a half-human/half-alien
cooked up by mingling DNA in a lab, Henstridge moves and speaks
with the innocent curiosity of a woman new to the planet. She
manages to take the curse off the porniness of the premise, which
has Sil looking ardently for a male with whom to mate. She's
pretty funny when she's devouring various men, who quickly go
from gratitude for her sexual avidity to horror -- especially
when she starts sprouting icky tentacles.
Fear of female sexuality! Vagina dentata! You can either
get all huffy about the politics of this stuff or you can giggle
at it, and for a while I had a great crappy good time. Species
is ecstatic trash when Sil is cruising Los Angeles; her utter
single-mindedness and sexual directness, which would look unseemly
even in a triple-X video, is a witty joke. But her scientific
pursuers (Ben Kingsley, Marg Helgenberger, Michael Madsen, Forest
Whitaker, Alfred Molina) are singularly colorless and clueless.
They run to and fro, racing to prevent Sil from boffing again,
and it never seems to occur to them -- or to the actors -- that
there's anything amusing in their mission. Species
clearly isn't riot-grrrl payback for monster-rapist junk like
Humanoids from the Deep: Sil does kill one womanizing
creep (as well as two nicer sexual conquests), but she also murders
three innocent women, one of whom has her thumb snipped off and
then dies screaming in a car explosion -- at which point Species,
for me, abruptly stopped being fun.
The script by Dennis Feldman (The Golden Child) is pitifully
unimaginative; the desperate brainiacs never think to set up
a decoy for Sil. (I'd nominate Michael Madsen, who was fine in
Reservoir
Dogs but has proceeded to give the exact same performance,
minus the ear-slicing sadism, in every subsequent role.) In a
former life, Roger Donaldson was the gifted director of Smash
Palace, Marie, and The Bounty; he hit his box-office
peak with No Way Out and has been in free-fall ever since
-- Cocktail, Cadillac Man, White Sands,
The Getaway, and now this movie. Donaldson's apparent
depression about his situation weighs Species down. Generally,
he just points the camera at things. Scenes begin, go on, and
are over.
The naked, exposed, inexperienced actress at the movie's center
deserves better. Actually, I couldn't say whether Natasha Henstridge
has much of a future in movies; she might go the way of such
previous nude man-killers as Mathilda May (Lifeforce)
and Patty Mullen (Frankenhooker). But aside from Michelle
Williams, who is touching in her few moments as the younger Sil,
Henstridge is the only performer in Species who doesn't
act as if she'd wandered into the wrong movie and wanted out.
Women
who chuckled at the movie version of The Bridges of Madison
County, in which the 64-year-old Clint Eastwood paired up
with the 45-year-old Meryl Streep, will want to know about First
Knight. In this umpteenth retelling of the King Arthur saga
-- the first movie directed by Jerry Zucker since his big hit
Ghost -- the 29-year-old Julia Ormond (as Guinevere) must
choose between the 45-year-old Richard Gere (as Lancelot) and
the 64-year-old Sean Connery (as Arthur). Poor Ormond has to
gaze longingly into the eyes of men who, theoretically, could
be her father and grandfather. Would American audiences accept
a movie in which the 30-year-old Keanu Reeves must choose between
the 45-year-old Streep and the 64-year-old Anne Bancroft? Talk
amongst yourselves.
In John Boorman's Excalibur, Arthur had a few years on
Lancelot, but the members of that romantic triangle were at least
within jousting distance of each other's age. The triangle was
also only part of the story. A born image-maker, Boorman caught
us up in the dark enchantment of Camelot. Jerry Zucker goes for
the lite enchantment of Harlequin paperbacks. Watching First
Knight, I wasn't bored, but I wasn't particularly enthralled,
either. Zucker started out as one-third of the Zucker-Abraham-Zucker
team (or ZAZ), who collaborated on Airplane! and Police
Squad. As Ghost and now First Knight prove,
Zucker is as single-minded about making women cry as he once
was about making guys laugh. This isn't versatility, exactly;
it's closer to ambidexterous manipulation.
Richard Gere is laughably miscast as Lancelot, but he manages
to be appealing anyway, unlike Kevin Costner's wet-puppy Robin
Hood (and Gere, learning from Costner's mistake, doesn't attempt
an English accent). Maybe what saves him is that Lancelot is
a noncommittal hero -- he keeps saying he doesn't care whether
he lives or dies -- and Gere gives a noncommittal performance,
so we're not embarrassed for him. He seems to be doing First
Knight as a lark, and we note how chipper he's looking these
days despite the trouble with Cindy. But when Lancelot is supposed
to drop his wanderer's cool and lose his heart to Guinevere,
Gere still doesn't commit himself. Staring blankly at the lovely
queen, he could be mentally composing his next Oscar-night speech
about Tibet. And sometimes he's annoyingly smug. Harrison Ford's
Han Solo got away with lines comparable to Lancelot's "I
can tell when women want me," because Ford put a parodic
spin on Han's cockiness. But when Gere says it, it just seems
like narcissism. He doesn't need Guinevere, he needs a mirror.
The other two leads fare better, though they have their own problems.
Julia Ormond, a British Snow White under glass, badly needs a
contemporary role with some spark. (Perhaps the upcoming Sabrina
will help.) She has delicate, expressive features, but in her
two movies so far (Legends of the Fall was the other)
she hasn't gotten to express much besides "I'm happy"
and "I'm sad." (In both movies, she gets passed back
and forth between guys, like a coveted baseball card.) I'd rather
she didn't turn into another overhyped one-note Julia, because
Ormond has some witty moments here when she's rebuffing the suave
Lancelot. It's always good to see Sean Connery, who by now seems
unimaginable without his imposing white beard (he's the only
major movie star who's consistently bearded), and he gets his
voice up near the end, when Arthur confronts his betrayers. But
Connery seems to be in a rut; he's played too many lions, and
most of his performance is perfectly fine and perfectly unsurprising.
He was great as the mild bookworm dad in Indiana Jones and
the Last Crusade -- he needs more comic roles that tinker
with his virile persona.
Jerry Zucker figures that what worked once will work again, and
in First Knight he brings back his Ghost team of
composer Jerry Goldsmith, cinematographer Adam Greenberg, and
editor Walter Murch (who's terrific with the lightning-fast sword
duels). He also brings back his Ghost sensibility. At
the beginning, Guinevere is strong; there's real authority in
the way she addresses the people of her land. But as the movie
goes on she becomes passive and weepy. Zucker plays it every
which way: Guinevere falls in love with Lancelot but doesn't
consummate her passion; then Arthur, having caught them in a
kiss and renounced them, forgives him just before his heroic
death and instructs Lancelot to "take care of her."
There's something sick about a Camelot movie in which the point
of the great Arthur's death is to bring the lovers together in
a guilt-free union. And if a film like this doesn't have Merlin
or Monty Python, what's the point any more?
There's an unsettling trend towards chivalry in recent movies,
both in period pieces like Rob Roy, Braveheart,
and First Knight and in more contemporary films like Forrest Gump
and Bridges of Madison County. In these movies, women
exist to be rescued -- from death, from boredom, from themselves.
Calgon, take me away! But the flip side of the fantasy of being
whisked away and worshipped is paternal objectification. When
Arthur first meets Lancelot, after Lancelot has just run the
lethal Gauntlet, the king offers Guinevere for Lancelot to kiss:
"Your prize." That's what she is in First Knight,
and all she is.
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