This intellectual property is about to hit it’s quarter century mark and it doesn’t look like it’s going to be swept under the pop cultural rug any time soon.
One movie, two long running series, a couple of straight to DVD flicks and a single season disaster. In fact MGM was recently trying to make it the masthead for their own pay to stream service.
If you never heard of Stargate: Origins you aren’t alone.
The plot has something to due with Nazis just before the start of WWII. The lead for what has always been a he-man action adventure franchise was (of course) a young woman. She was the silly action figure version of the old lady from the first movie; Katherine. The trailer featured men being in awe of what an ass kicker she suddenly turned into. The Katherine character had never been a noted ass kicker before but I was okay with that. Largely, because it meant that I didn’t have to waste any time or money watching something that was obviously hot garbage. It was supposed to run for ten episodes and they only made three of them. I don’t think I missed anything.
It was a stupid idea and a sad one. The Stargate franchise has always had fairly strong female characters without making any them into men with tits. Starting with the first one, Stargate (1994).
After some measured success with Moon 44 and Universal Solider, Stargate was Roland Emmerich’s shot at the big time and there is no getting around it, he hit the target. A twenty million dollar film that made around two hundred million worldwide. Rather than make a sequel he moved on to become the king of the Nineties Disaster Movies. Can’t fault his career choice. Although recently, he tried to reboot Stargate with the brilliant idea of chucking 100% of the TV canon. His vision and only his vision was to be the one that counted. This flick appears to have died in development and Stargate fans everywhere are deeply grateful. In truth the TV series was in production for so long that the original film is barely a footnote by now. The fans would have rejected it out of hand.
Emmerich’s ideas for the reboot were totally wrong and yet he got a lot right with the first film.
Not that it didn’t have it’s downsides as well.
The Good:
The very first thing is the music. There is no getting around it. This is undoubtedly David Arnold’s best work and it contributes massively to the film’s tone. Honestly, I’m not sure Stargate would have ever been anything other than some utterly forgotten, medium grade, mid-90’s popcorn burner if it hadn’t been for Arnold’s score. In my view it’s up there with John William’s Star Wars and it absolutely carried the picture. When the film begins, the opening strands of flutes conveyed ancient mystery, then it slowly built to a magnificent crescendo that brilliantly depicted glorious wonder.
Emmerich’s direction and cinematography were also good. He was just coming out of the Indy world so he was used to doing a lot with a little. Here he managed to recreate the feel of a Cecil B Demille’s biblical epic with what was, in it’s day, a shoestring budget.
The acting was good. This is Kurt Russel’s most under-rated performance. You could really see the pain in his eyes as the father whose only son was tragically dead. He was a man with nothing to live for and was thus quite willing to die. Duty was the only thing that was animating him.
David Spader’s Daniel Jackson was a brilliant but demi-autistic Egyptologist, whose quest for a truth that he knew to be real, had utterly destroyed his career and his reputation. That was well presented when we are introduced to Katherine, who points out, “everything you own is in those to two bags.” It was only natural that he would leap for a chance to prove his theories right.
Shau’ri as portrayed by Israeli actress Mili Avital, while born into a genuinely patriarchal society and was given to a stranger as a gift, turned out to be strong enough to start a rebellion on behalf of a husband she literally had only just met the day before. This is how you portray a genuinely strong woman.
These guys all brought the goods. Nobody was phoning it in.
The Mediocre:
The script. It really isn’t one of the all time greats. This was after all a Roland Emmerich film and he prefers to tell a story in sweeping imagery. Okay so far as that goes but…
The film opens in 1922 in Egypt. In less than two minutes we see some of the worst archaeology this side of Indiana Jones. Little Katherine steals an artifact off a cataloging table because she thinks it’s pretty. Horrifyingly egregious field practice but then that was to be expected because the professor in charge, clearly learned his craft at the feet of Heinrich Schliemann. Without any kind of orders from him the workers start (for no apparent reason at all) to haul this big metal ring they just found upright. While the cinematography does what Emmerich wanted it to and evokes images of Hebrew Slaves raising a monolith, the emotional impact was quite far from pure. By 1994 pretty much everyone knew that you didn’t do shit like that during an archaeological dig. I recall that I was expecting the professor to run in screaming at them, “stop it you morons! What the hell are you doing?! This is site contamination! This is destruction of the dig field. You’re ruining my life’s work!” But no, he just stands there in wonder and astonishment.
Later in the film. When Daniel spots some Airman reading a newspaper, he makes a deus ex machina leap in logic that allows him eureka his way to the conclusion that the symbols on the gate are constellations. Okay, occasionally you need to kick start a story and in truth I’ve done worse myself. But then we find out that they had long since been able to plug in six of the seven symbols needed to activate it. Yeah there was a lot of random pictograph shit on this device but they had it for seventy two years! It was another Roland Emmerich WTF moment, where any reasonably mid-to low wit audience member was saying, “why the hell didn’t they just try each symbol? Just try each one, you’ve literally had decades to work this out.” I know Emmerich likes to keep things dumbed down but seriously, anyone who successfully managed to pay the price of admission was again left going, “oh come on, movie! Stop it!”
The recon mission is possibly the least well thought out military expedition in history. “Doctor Jackson says he can decode the dial home address from the other side. Let’s roll! … Aw shit, he just remembered to tell us he’ll need a rock with the Stargate address for Earth on the other side of the wormhole. Maybe, we should have talked things over with him a bit more before taking a one way trip to the other side of the universe.” Honestly, the Donner Party had things better planned than this.
And why all those flairs instead of flashlights? Flashlights are good. NVG maybe a bit better when you aren’t trying to skyline yourself to the locals…Which admittedly wasn’t a big priory for this mission now that I think about it.
This film is filled with crap like this.
Imagery superseded any kind of real world logical restraints on the story. It’s lazy but it has to be said, James Cameron does the exact same damn thing. Besides that wasn’t the worst thing in this movie.
The Creepy:
In the early 1990s there was no greater source of dudebro fun than watching The Crying Game with a friend who wasn’t in on the “secret.”
Cataline the Younger (watching his friend’s face and not the screen): Whoa, things are getting good, now! Let’s see what she’s got!
Dudebro Friend: Who is this chick? I’ve never seen her before. Yeah she’s totally smoking hot. Kind of a flatty but DUDE! WHAT THE FUCK?
Cataline the Younger: Ha! Ha! Ha! (gasp…wheez…gasp) Ha! Ha! Ha!
Dudebro Friend: No! NONONO!
Cataline the Younger: You’re gay now! You were turned on by a dude. Totally gay!
Dudebro Friend: Fuck you! I didn’t know it was a guy!
Cataline the Younger: I. Have. Planted. The Seed. Of. Doubt.
Dudbro: What is wrong with you?
Cataline the Younger (wiping tears of laughter from his eyes): That was so good! We gotta do this to Jimmy now.
Dudbro (pauses for a moment): Fuck yeah! You got his number?
Good times. Good times.
There is no denying it, Jay Davidson had a gift. But it was a weird one. He was a man who could send out the actual female vibe.
Most Trans want to do it but can’t. He could. In The Crying Game it was great for shock value when the big reveal happened. But in Stargate it was very odd and off putting because he was meant to be playing a 10,000 year old boy. As creepy as Jaye Davidson’s androgyny was, it didn’t hold a candle to the homo-erotic pedophilia on display.
Back when I first saw it, I dismissed it with a, meh, the director is trying to do an old timey Ancient Movie Egypt look.
Given what we have found out in the last few years, the scales have fallen from my eyes. The cesspit is pretty deep in Hollywood. If something looks creepy to you then the motives behind it were undoubtedly just as creepy. You don’t come up with images like that unless your imagination spends a lot time in that place.
“For me, being gay in Hollywood was easy,” Roland Emmerich recently said.
When Stargate was adapted for television, it was first run on Showtime. Showtime demanded a nude scene for an actress and it’s to the producer’s credit that he fought it. It was shot anyway but he fought it. When I recently rewatched the pilot, I saw that the full frontal nude in question had been changed into a ‘from the shoulders up shot.’ Good for him.
For his part Jay Davidson, quit acting and went back to being a model. I’d say good for him as well but now he’s a tatted out circus freak.
So in conclusion. Stargate was a film where the science was done by people who didn’t science at all. The story was incredibly weak in every way available to it. Style mattered drastically more than substance and there was a strong pedophile vibe to it.
But the music is still great and it’s still a decent enough action/adventure/explorer film.
If you want to see a good versions of Stargate, no problem. SG1 and Atlantis, are available on Amazon Prime now, as well as the made for DVD films of Continuum and Ark of Truth.
Stargate Universe is also available but it was touched by John Scalzi and so tragically it is utter crap.
Okay, I’m done here.
The Dark Herald 
My favorite actor on SG1 was Don Davis, who played General Hammond (is that name right? Going from memory). Davis had been an Army Captain and was able to provide the show with a realistic military presence which was otherwise completely lacking.
The best part of SGU was annoying the actress who played the character dubbed by the fans as “Major Rack.” She HATED that.
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Yes, the late Don Davis is correct
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Honestly, all of the characters on SGU were annoying. The sad part is that it didn’t have to be so bad.
What destroyed the franchise was John Scalzi’s Alpha Male resentment.
What SG1 and SG Atlantis had in common was that Alpha males were the heroes.
Where as in SGU Alpha Males were either lost or overbearing assholes and it was the Gamma Males who were the heroes.
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Cataline, did you ever see the movie Disney’s Atlantis? I actually saw that film first, and as a kid I absolutely loved it. It is still one of my favorite more “recent” Disney animated films, up there with Treasure Planet. It wasn’t until later in life that I saw Stargate, and realized that Atlantis was an almost verbatim rip-off of that earlier film, from the core plot concept to the protagonist’s character archetype.
If you have seen it, do you have any thoughts on that film?
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The scene with them excavating the gate is acceptable. It is the equivalent of a computer hacking or usage scene in any movie. Sure it isn’t the way things are really done. However, how often do movies get any job right except when they talk about themselves?
Editing hurt some of the logic of the recon mission. In a brief scene on the Ultimate Version DVD of the film, they added back in a brief scene with O’Neil and the general. The general asks him if he thinks Jackson knows what he is doing. O’Neil answers pointedly in the negative. The general then says that the mission is his call. That he still does the mission points to his not wanting to live. It was an odd choice to cut that scene.
They could have easily come up with a quick explanation of why they just did not try all of the symbols. It destroyed the building last time and took a decade to get working again. Maybe an incorrect sequence damage a rare key component. Anything with a little thinking would have worked.
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