- Writers:
- Dean Devlin & Roland Emmerich.
- Director:
- Roland Emmerich.
- Cast:
- Kurt Russell, James Spader, Jaye Davidson, Mili Avital.
Colonel Jack (Kurt Russell) and Action Jackson (James Spader) take in the atmosphere.
OK. Let’s get the opening confessions out of the way: I’m a Stargate SG-1 fan, and the last time I saw the feature was more than ten years ago, long before the series premièred. So, I won’t pretend I don’t see the series as the “real” version of the mythos, but I’ve tried to keep an open mind.
The film opens in Egypt in 8000 BCEi where people flee from a bright light. Next, it’s 1928 and a German archaeologist and his daughter find a big round thing — looks just like a stargate. After which, we’re in “present day”, where American archaeologist Daniel Jackson (James Spader, who sounds uncannily like Michael Shanks’s Jackson, which warmed me immediately to his performance) is a laughing stock in the academic community for his theories about the pyramids being older than generally acceptedii. As it turns out, the big round thing was a stargate, an alien device that can open a wormhole to the other side of the universeiii, and the military wants Jackson’s help figuring out how to make it work.
Jackson is played by James Spader, so of course he does figure it out. Along with Colonel Jack O’Neil (Kurt Russell)iv and a military team, Jackson goes through the gate, and they find themselves in a desert on a planet on the other side of the universev. On Abydos, they meet Skaara (Alexis Cruz), Shau’rivi (Mili Avital), and the rest of the Abydonians (and boy, there’s a lot of them — half the budget must’ve been extras) who are ruled by an alien (Jaye Davidson) posing as the ancient Egyptian god Ra.
Unlike Brad Wright and Richard Dean Anderson, Emmerich doesn’t really go for their trademark mix of humour and high-concept science fiction, instead aiming for a fairly serious tone and a Ridley-Scottian mise-en-scène full of smoke and shadows, centred on Russell’s moody, grieving O’Neil. Thankfully the seriousness is offset somewhat by Spader’s charmingly enthusiastic performance, and the charisma of the actor’s portraying the locals; especially Avital, who does a good job portraying Shau’ri as a well-rounded, believable character. Quite a long stretch of the film is devoted to getting to know the locals, which works to it’s favour; it’s genuinely interesting to see Jackson learning the language (even if the process is severely truncated) and seeing him interact with Shau’ri. In fact, I wish there’d been more of Shau’ri; she’s clearly an intelligent, capable woman, something the film sorely needs.
The basic premise of the film — an alien parasite posing as a god and his human slaves rebelling against him — is compelling, and Jaye Davidson is amazing as Ra: there’s something otherworldly and alluring about his androgynous features, and something deeply disturbing about the harem of scantily clad children he surrounds himself with. Unfortunately the premise and all the interesting aspects of the film never quite gel; it’s like fragments of several great films shoved into a single film, and the end product falls well short of greatness.
- Around the time when culture began to centralise around the Nile, which is a nice touch by the writers. ↩
- Oddly, the audience begins heckling him before he’s even had a chance to explain his theories. One wonders if an academic once kicked Devlin’s dog or something. ↩
- For those of you keeping track of differences between film and TV continuities, the TV gate can connect to several other gates within the Milky Way, but needs much more power and special programming to reach “gate networks” in other galaxies. ↩
- Another DBFTC: Russell’s O’Neil — one L, no sense of humour; Richard Dean Anderson’s O’Neill: two Ls, all sense of humour. ↩
- DBFTC: In the series it’s a planet relatively close to Earth called Abydos. ↩
- Sha’re in the series. ↩
