Review: Stargate (1994)

Let’s talk about Roland Emmerich again. More specifically, that film he made about the glasses- wearing nerd that teams up with military people to deal with a foreboding scifi threat. No, not that one. No, not that either. It’s the film that launched something far bigger than itself—Stargate.

I must admit, I’ve only been fairy casually into Stargate as a massive TV franchise—sure, I can tell you roughly who the Gou’ald are, and their relation to the Jaffa (it’s got nothing to do with oranges for one), but I’d have less luck with the details of plot arcs and the like. I have, however, seen the 1994 film that kickstarted it all, which is a self-contained story, and just for the hell of it let’s give it another look.

This was Emmerich’s next big thing after Universal Soldier, which mostly consisted of Jean Claude Van Damme and Dolph Lundgren trying to one-up each other on dialogue-mangling accents. Like many of the films that Emmerich teamed up with producer buddy Dean Devlin on, the teaser marketing of this one was spot on—tempting audiences with a setup of a big temporal donut gate that could lead to anywhere. Sure, the main trailers then went and spoiled the whole film, but like the teasers for ‘98’s Godzilla that showed only body parts of the monster, or the ones for Independence Day that had only the White House’s incineration, it did the job of grabbing people’s attention. It even became the first blockbuster to make use of this weird nerdy thing that made funny noises on the phone line—the ‘internet’. Yep, before viral marketing, this got ahead of the curve with it’s very own, laughably formatted website!

And the film itself? Well, it stars James Spader as every other Emmerich lead character—an unorthodox geeky researcher shunned by others, in this case Daniel Jackson. Jackson is busy peddling ‘alternate’ theories about the pyramids decades before the History Channel shat itself, when he gets recruited by the US military to translate a mysterious Egyptian artifact. He proves so good at translating, in fact, that he can decipher words that don’t actually exist, like, well, ‘Stargate’.

Before long, he’s teamed up with Kurt Russel, (doing a visual impression of Guile from Street Fighter far better than JCVD ever did) whose performance as the tortured but stoic Colonel O’Neil is fairly decent. The two and a team of commandos cross the threshold of the Stargate into…a big pyramid and a desert planet. Most of the film takes place across sandy expanses—there’s not much in the way of strange new worlds here. It becomes rather moot as they make contact with the locals, who strangely enough are primitive humans, leaving Jackson to try and communicate with them.

And that’s all before the alien overlord Ra, possessing the androgynous body of Jaye Davidson, shows up in his giant flying pyramid spaceship. Yep, the film isn’t saying aliens built the pyramids, but it was totally aliens.

Let’s start with the pluses first—the film has aged pretty well visually for the most part, relying on many location shots, lavish sets, practical effects and costumes, and so on. Ra’s masked soldiers look very cool—their helmets come with their own animatronic articulation, looking menacing yet ornate. The Stargate itself still is nicely impressive, and overall, it looks pretty real and well-shot. Some of the CGI and compositing, especially at the very end when Ra’s pyramid takes off, has aged a little less.

David Arnold’s score is also very suited and epic—taking a few cues from Lawrence of Arabia, but it fits. The main overture is great, and indeed went on to become the theme for the TV series, lasting on for years. Arnold went on to do a similarly grand set of music for ID4, and in general, I do miss the bombastic soundtracks nineties blockbusters often sported.

The performances are mixed; Kurt Russell brings a nice intensity, and he gets some more emoting done in the extended version. Spader is okay, doing the best he can with what he has—his character feels a bit cliché now, apparently inspiring others like Michael J Fox’s role in Atlantis: The Lost Empire. Davidson looks oddly menacing as Ra…but he speaks exclusively in flanged alien speak throughout the movie, which does lessen his impact. Imagine if Thanos went around speaking in autotuned gibberish.

The rest of the film feels more low-key than you might expect—a lot of it is based around Jackson trying to talk to the locals, with some very obnoxious product placement for candy bars put in between. So much of the dialogue is supposedly a variant of Ancient Egyptian, and while I do find the idea of crossing the language barrier a rather underused one in scifi, it kind of drags here. See Arrival for something like this done much better.

Ra himself is also slightly lacklustre as a villain. He tends to monologue at length, and for all his bragging, his forces seem pretty teeny for an intergalactic alien overlord—no more than a dozen soldiers and two fighters? It feels slightly contrived so that Russell and his meagre platoon can actually stand a chance. Even so, the final battle does play out reasonably enjoyably, even if it’s not a patch on the giant spectacle of Independence Day.

Overall, Stargate is…alright. Unless you’re a diehard scifi movie fan it’s nothing I’d suggest you rush out and see, and while it did set up some of the groundwork for the shows, the series took the premise and mostly did its own thing. Over countless seasons and settings, we ended up with a franchise rivalled only in duration and length by Smallville and Doctor Who on the small screen. The vast majority of fans won’t think of Kurt Russell, they’ll think of the cast they got to know and love over all those years.

For that reason I suppose you can give this movie some significance; after all, Independence Day, despite succeeding better at being a blockbuster, inspired only a ho-hum sequel twenty years later in the long run. Sometimes it’s interesting to see where it all began, and for what it’s worth, you can find plenty worse starts than this.