Stargate

Rating:
Summary: You have to watch
Review: This movie is very good because they have broken through and you want to see what the people look like.

Rating:
Summary: Look to the Stars
Review: I have to hand it to science fiction; it is one of the few genres that can have mediocre acting and still be a good movie. Stargate's story is the reason for its success. The movie tells the story of a race of aliens that used (notice how I did not say built) an interstellar portal, called a Stargate, in order to bring humans to a new planet for slave labor. This all happened during the time of ancient Egypt, so there is a disticnt Egyptian flavor throughout the film, which I found very intriguing. In 1928, archeaologists find the Stargate and are baffled by it. In the present day, the Stargate is in the hands of the United States Air Force, and they hire an Egyptologist named Daniel Jackson (James Spader) to decipher the markings on the gate. Jackson is somewhat infamous in his field, because he denies that humans built the pyramids. He believes that it was done by aliens, but he has no proof to back it up. The Air Force also brings in an old retired colonel, named Jack O'Neil (Kurt Russell) in order to "supervise" the project. Once Jackson gets the Stargate operational, a team, led by O'Neil and including Jackson for scientific purposes, goes through the gate and ends up on a planet in a galaxy far far away (sorry, I couldn't help myself). On the planet, they encounter other humans who still speak ancient Egyptian as well as a race of humanoid aliens who are keeping the men as slaves.
The story is very inventive and it is what finally saved the movie for me. Spader did okay in his role, but Russell seemed to have two modes: angry and sarcastic. One thing that I didn't understand was that Russell gets top billing, but the movie is essentially about Spader's Jackson. Also, I didn't like Ra (Jaye Davidson), the leader of the aliens. He was a good character, but he was so creepy just because he looks so much like a woman! I could barely look at him it was so disturbing. But besides these two things, Stargate is a great movie. The effects are great, and as I have already stated, the story is amazing.

Rating:
Summary: Looks good, sounds good, but...
Review: I think one of the reasons a highly successful television show spawned from this film is because the producers felt they had to redeem themselves. Although the movie manages to fit ancient Egyptian deities, a pyramid-shaped spaceship, aliens,a nuclear bomb, military ops, a marriage, and messages about everything from slavery to gun control into its two hours, there are still enough plot holes to fit the Giza pyramids in.

In fact, the film seems like it would have made a much better movie for TV to begin with. Throughout the entire film, I felt like I had already watched every scene in some other Sci-fi flick. Maybe it was a prototype ten years ago, but now the ideas seem just too stereotypical. The film starts out with an ancient Egyptian dig in the 1920's- Indiana Jones, anyone? - where an ancient stone portal is unearthed, then flashes forward to an unappreciated scientist in the present day, who is recruited to work on the mysterious project of figuring out what the heck the so-called Stargate is supposed to do. Once he does (which takes him all of seven minutes, and you're supposed to assume that the scientists before him couldn't figure out what a triangle symbolized in ancient Egypt)he goes with a scout team led by Kurt Russel into a strange desert planet where dread-locked, shabbily dressed people mine minerals.

From there, what could have been a promising movie disintegrates into one goofy scene after another: the native's discovery of the miraculous workings of guns and cigarette lighters (just what I would want to give another civilization), a group of liberty-minded teenagers form a motley crew of militants dressed in the scout team's army vests and helmets,James Spader suddenly learns how to speak ancient Egyptian, subtitles appear, than inconveniently disappear, then appear again, and Kurt Russel gets to kick the stuffing out of Anubis and Horus.

There are, however, advantages to this film. There are some winning scenes, most of them with Viveca Lindfors, who plays the aged leader of the Stargate investigation team. She's absolutely charming. James Spader is presentable as the geeky but heroic Daniel Jackson, but he doesn't really have to do anything in the last forty minutes or so because he's always running around. He's much better playing skeevy guys (for instance, his neat role in Sex, Lies and Videotape). Kurt Russel and Jaye Davidson, as Colonel O'Neil and Ra respectively, are the best parts of the whole movie, probably because they just look so fabulous. Jaye Davidson is so androgynously beautiful you wish there were more scenes with him. Kurt Russel plays the melancholy but efficient O'Neil with far less humor than Richard Anderson does on TV, but golly, does he look handsome. Plus, keep an ear open for David Arnold's score. Like everything else in this movie, it borrows heavily from its genre predecessors (in this case, Star Wars), but it's still very, very good.

As for the DVD, the special features didn't mean much to me, since I didn't like the film too much anyway, but the color was striking (much yellow and blue, which seems to have been picked solely to accent Mr. Russel's blond hair and blue eyes, and I'm not just saying that) and the sound was also great. If you're in the mood to get a movie that you don't have to think much about, or if you're looking for a creative explanation of the origin of mankind, then this might be of some interest to you.

Rating:
Summary: Great moive
Review: I love this movie. Great action. I also like the whole idea of using myths to come up with bad guys. Very original. The only thing I didn't like was the DVD opitions. No subtitles was only in Spanish. :(

Rating:
Summary: Cat squiggle gate symbol star...
Review: The film 'Stargate' is based on an interesting albeit not entirely original premise -- the idea that the ancients have been visited from beings from the stars is as ancient as is humanity; the particular idea for this film probably came from the Erik von Daniken type of UFO conjectures quite in vogue in the 1970s. In all, it is an intriguing idea, pulling in the mystery of ancient civilisations, the ancient pyramids, the mysticism that underlies all forms of writing, and pictographic/hieroglyphic writing at that, and good old fashioned heroism.

The story begins with a discovery during the golden age of Middle Eastern archaeology, in the early twentieth century. Drawing on ideas that still circulate today in real academic circles that the pyramids and other structures pre-date the actual historically-recorded empires in Egypt, in the story it turns out the discovery was actually an ancient device that served as a passageway for extraterrestrials who needed mining workers for the resources of this and other planets.

The key to this 'stargate' is embedded in the inscriptions on the device, and Daniel Jackson (James Spader) is the only one who can decipher them. Jackson is a down-on-his-luck Egyptologist whose out-of-this-world ideas rendered him unemployed and destitute -- the perfect recruit for a secret government mission.

Enter into the scene Colonel O'Neil (Kurt Russell), a depressive, mourning military officer pulled out of retirement to take charge of a near-certain-death mission through the stargate. The clash between the academics/scientists and the military is a classic story development, but the clash is shortlived here as the team going to the distant planet must work together.

Arriving on the distant planet, they find people and environment similar to that of ancient Egypt, and the whole civilisation has the purpose of mining minerals for their 'god', who turns out to be an extraterrestrial with nearly infinite lifespan and manipulative ways of subduing cultures, primarily by keeping them illiterate and technologically backward. This 'god' presented himself as 'Ra' to the ancient Egyptians (played here by Jaye Davidson, the ambiguous star of the 'The Crying Game', being the only other film he starred in before opting out of acting).

The action picks up with 'Ra' arriving for a regular shipment, only to find the Earth team ready to begin revolution and destroy the distant stargate with a smuggled nuclear weapon.

The special effects are good if not innovative; the idea of the device and the method of transport is an effective use of special effects technology at hand, and much is carried on the story and the idea of the device rather than the actual computer or miniature effects. This has proven a boon to the producers, who are able to budget for a weekly series derivative of this film, not something originally planned with the production of this film.

The acting is good, occasionally great. The perhaps the best character is Viveca Lindfors, who plays the daughter of the original archaeologist who discovered the device; now an elderly woman, her dream comes true of activating the device. Lindfors died the year after this film was made, after a career in acting that spanned over six decades. Watch closely for French Stewart, as a disgruntled soldier, barely recognisable as the same person who plays on 'Third Rock from the Sun', a very different science fiction idea.

In all, this is a good story, a fine film and it captures the imagination well. It is not over the top and doesn't overwork the classic science fiction stereotypes. The special edition contains interesting commentary from the director Roland Emmerich and producer Dean Devlin in director's cut, includes the theatrical trailer, includes both director's cut and theatrical cut, and presents things in a widescreen format.

Rating:
Summary: STARGATE ROCKS
Review: I'M A HUGE SCI-FI FAN BUT STARGATE ROCKS IT WILL NOCK YOUR SOCKS OFF IT WAS AWESOME THE SPECIAL IFFECTS ARE AWESOME I DID NOT SEE THE DVD VERSION THE VIDEOCASSETTE VERSION IS AWESOME

Rating:
Summary: Aims high; mostly succeeds
Review: I've never seen the TV series that this movie spawned; this is a review of the movie on its own terms.

This movie is _so_ close to being great that it's frustrating not to be able to award it five stars. Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin had a terrific idea here and _almost_ sustained it for the length of a feature film.

The essential idea owes a lot to Robert A. Heinlein's _Tunnel in the Sky_ (and some of the plot details show debts to other Heinlein works as well). There's this stargate, see . . .

Well, that's enough about the plot, just in case you haven't seen it yet. For SF geeks like me, the first hour and a half is like a wet-dream come true. The ending doesn't exactly fall apart or anything, it's just that it doesn't manage to remain at the high level of the first two-thirds of the movie.

As Col. Jack O'Neil, Kurt Russell is terrific as usual (and I happen to think he deserves far more credit as an actor than he's generally gotten). James Spader is a bit hammy but generally credible as Daniel Jackson, the absent-minded academic-outcast astro-Egyptologist dweeb. In lesser hands these two characters could have devolved into cliches, but these actors manage to keep them alive. Of course there's also Jaye Davidson, the special secret surprise from _The Crying Game_, here used very effectively in a role I can't say anything about without spoiling the plot.

David Arnold's soaring score is just awesome. You'll want to plug your DVD player into your sound system for this one (if you don't have it there already).

And the plot is intellectually engaging for at least most of the way through. The, um, foreign culture in question is nicely evoked and fleshed out, with a few cinematic nods to everything from _Dune_ to Indiana Jones to _The Man Who Would Be King_, and without too many of the oversimplifications that always threaten films of this sort.

I have no idea at all how well the TV series has done in sustaining this stuff. But the movie stands quite well on its own.

The _Ultimate_ DVD set includes both a 'director's cut' and the original theaterical-release version -- plus some nice commentaries and interviews. The interviewees include (who else?) Erich von Daniken, whose _Chariots of the Gods?_ was part of the popular literature of my youth. If you've even heard of him, you'll probably like this movie.

Rating:
Summary: The okay movie that became a really great television series
Review: It is interesting to watch the 1994 "Stargate" film from the perspective of the spin-off television series, "Stargate SG-1," which is on its way to becoming the longest running science-fiction series of all-time. As was the case with "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," we have an okay film that becomes a first-rate television series.

Once upon a time, 1928 to be exact, archeologists discovered a strange disc buried in the sand of Egypt. The next thing we know we are in the present, and Egyptologist Daniel Jackson (James Spader), is having his colleagues walk out on him as he explains his radical theory about the ancient Egyptians and their language. But then a mysterious old woman (Viveca Lindfors) gives him an invitation to travel to a secret military base buried beneath the Rocky Mountains to do translations. Jackson has nothing else to do, so he shows up, immediately corrects all the mistakes and figures out all the mysteries, and the next thing we know he is being shown the Stargate. He then joins a military group led by Colonel Jack O'Neil (Kurt Russell), who has been recalled back to active duty to find out where you go to when you step through the Stargate. The answer is you go to the other side of the known universe where you discover a desert planet where an alien who was known as Ra (Jaye Davidson) by the ancient Egyptians is lording it over the local humanoids.

This movie is mostly eye candy. Being shot on a desert planet means that it has lots of scenes shot in bright sunlight, which really is unusual for a science fiction film, where they tend to be dark and murky. "Stargate" brings back the same sort of ideological tension between scientists and the military that we enjoyed during the 1950s with films like "The Thing From Another World," as Jackson is all excited to explore a brave new world and O'Neill is looking for an excuse to blow everything up with the nuke in the big suitcase.

Truth about this movie is that it the ideas are a lot better than than the execution. The idea of the Stargate is a nice way of circumventing the laws of physics that scoff at warp drive and other narrative necessities to a good space yarn. It is not a far leap of logic to get from this one Stargate to the idea that there are others, and there is also the nice corrollary that this system explains why there are so many humans scattered throughout the galaxy where they all live on oxygen breathing planets.

Beyond that the television series picks up on the Jackson-O'Neill dyad, reducing it to the idea that one is an academic and the other is a warrior and never the twain shall meet. Of course Richard Dean Anderson's O'Neill is even quirkier than Spader's Jackson, while Michael Shanks's Jackson starts off even more humorless than Russell's O'Neill. But it all works, so why quibble? The original "Stargate" ends up being more about style than substance, which is why it is so interesting that the television series could find something substantial upon which to build a television series.

If you have yet to see "Stargate" in any version, then you are strongly urged to proceed immediately from this 1994 film to the first season of "Stargate SG-1." Even if you find this film tedious, just get through it and move on to the good stuff. You could not pass go and head directly for season one of "Stargate SG-1," but you really need to know the players and some of the rules of the game before hand.

Rating:
Summary: The Original to the TV Series
Review: My wife really likes the TV series so, when she borrowed the movie from a friend, I figured I'd watch it, too. I enjoyed the movie. This doesn't quite rate among the "must see" science fiction but it's definitely worth watching. Not to mention, the movie gives a good background for the TV series.

The version we watched was older with very limited extra features. There was some background information about the cast and crew, a teaser and a trailer. If you like special features (as do I), then you would do well to read the fine print before buying, particularly if buying used. My choice would be the 'Ultimate Edition'.

Rating:
Summary: Curt , Spider and Amon Ra
Review: This movie is sooo good. Its one of the best science fiction movie ive seen. I really think Kurt and James Spider did a great job but my favorte character is Ra.
I have a thing for the bad guys in movies. Ra (Jaye Davidson) and the emperor (Ian Mcdirmid) are tow of my favorite villian's.

But it takes more than cool villians to make a good movie, it needs a good plot ofcourse, the special effects need to be good and the acting needs to be realistic. This movie has got it all and much, much more. A must see for any star-wars, star-trek ore any other sciance fiction fans.