Species
(R)This movie is technically more horror than sci-fi, but it's sci-fi enough in its underlying premise that I chose to put the review here instead of under "scary movies." Also I didn't really find it particularly scary. Um... it came out in 1995, but I didn't see it until 2013. There have been three sequels, the first of which is on the DVD double feature I got, but I very much doubt I'll ever watch the other two (which were direct-to-video, unlike the first sequel). The movie has a decent cast, though I don't think much of the writing.
Anyway, it begins in some secret government facility, where there's a girl who appears to be around 12 years old (played by Michelle Williams). She's in some kind of isolation/observation thing, and suddenly people pump cyanide into the room, to kill her. But she breaks out, and everyone starts chasing her. She escapes from the facility, and gets away on a train. Soon after that, the head of the facility, Xavier Fitch, assembles a team to track her down. There's an empath named Dan Smithson, a molecular biologist named Dr. Laura Baker (Marg Helgenberger), an anthropologist named Stephen Arden, and a mercenary named Preston 'Press' Lennox. Fitch explains to them that SETI had gotten a message from space with instructions for combining some new kind of DNA with human DNA, and the result was this girl, whom they called Sil. She grew much faster than an ordinary human, and I guess the form we first saw her in was when she was just a few months old. While on the train, Sil metamorphoses into a full-grown woman (Natasha Henstridge).
The rest of the movie is basically Sil trying to find a man to mate with, so she can reproduce. Though she's apparently a bit selective, not wanting a mate with any genetic defects. Meanwhile the team keeps chasing leads, always just barely missing her after she kills someone. And I don't really want to say anything else about the plot. Not that there's much more to say, anyway. It wasn't a bad movie, but I wouldn't really call it good, either. I'm glad to have finally seen it, though.