Stargate

I would say I'm pretty well versed in a lot of science fiction properties. I'm not going to many conventions and I wouldn't say I'm going to be the MVP at any one property beyond Star Wars trivia night any time soon, but I do love a lot of different science fiction properties. Star Wars, Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, Doctor Who, the works.

However, one franchise that has alluded me has been the Stargate franchise. I remember watching the spinoff TV shows when I was younger and having no idea what the premise really was or what it was based off. For a short amount of time, I was interested in figuring it out, but then I lost that interest. I can't really say I've regained it, but I did notice that the original movie was on Amazon Prime and I thought I'd give it a shot and actually try and understand the cultural phenomena.

Stargate stars James Spader as Daniel Jackson, an archeologist and linguist who is brought into a secret military project to decipher some ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics on what he later figures out is the Stargate.

Jackson is your stereotypical nerd and not a lot is known about him besides the fact that he is a nerd. And you can tell because this movie was made in the 90s and he has glasses. In fact the first 30-40 minutes of this movie is just him drawing on whiteboards to explain things as well as carrying around large rolled up pieces of paper... because its the 90s.

But Jackson begins working and starts to make some progress on the hieroglyphics that this military project is working on. So much progress that they show him, the Stargate.

The Stargate is a large ancient circle device that all the hieroglyphics are on and when they select the correct symbols, the gate opens to another world across the galaxy.

Eventually, Jackson is sent with a small military team, led by Colonel Jack O'Neil (played by Kurt Russell) into the portal to simply figure out whats on the other side. Jackson's purpose of going is to reopen the portal to give them a way home.

On the other end of the Stargate, they find a massive desert, a pyramid, and a native culture that does not speak their language and who worship the Egyptian god Ra. The team needs to find the symbols required to reopen the portal and escape the foreign land before a strange group dedicated to the Egyptian God Ra ends up destroying them.

 So the plot is pretty simple. They go into the gate, they need to find a way home. But with a simple plot like that you really need to depend on the characters to make it more interesting. Unfortunately, Spader and Russell, two actors I really, REALLY like, don't do much for this movie. It's not that their acting is bad, it's just that they're not given much as far as a script goes. Not a whole lot happens in this movie and the things that do happen are really quite boring. I'd say it's going more for a Star Trek approach where it's supposed to be more of a thinking man's movie, not so much a shoot em up, but that's not really true. Half the characters in this movie are hardened military people who are ready to shoot things up any time now. Besides the idea of trying to communicate with a race of people who don't speak english, there aren't that many big ideas in this movie. It really is, guys are stuck on one side of the gate, they need to get home... that's it.

The most unsurprising thing you'll probably ever hear in your entire life is that Kurt Russell is the best part of this movie. He plays Jack O'Neil, this hardened Air Force Colonel reeling from the death of his son. He's so your typical military character that I half expected his character to turn evil suddenly like these characters always do, but that never really happens. He just keeps on being the GI Joe of the group and absolutely refuses to carry any weapon with more than one hand.

Unfortunately, even he is pretty boring at times because while he is your stereotypical military character, he doesn't have too much of a personality, otherwise he'd be forced to be the bad guy of the film. Instead he just kind of stares, sticks up for Jackson from time to time, and then at the end, when the shooting starts, he gets a badass one-liner and an awesome scene where he winks at a bad guy before blowing him away with his one handed sub machine gun antics.

The villain in this movie is super boring.

I don't really know what else to really say because the villain is just so boring. I almost wish that Kurt Russell would have had a turn and just been the ultimate bad guy but the truth is they go with evil alien enslaving a native people and the heroic white dudes are off to the rescue. And that's not to say that storyline can't be good, there are plenty of movies that say otherwise and it's that exact point that makes it worth mentioning that this story has been done before, it's been done since, and in both cases it's been done better.

The best example of this, and this will pertain to millennials like me who know this story from a different movie that did it a lot better. It took me a little bit but when I saw it, I couldn't unsee it.This movie's plot is really ripped off by Atlantis: The Lost Empire.

The similarities are too many to count, but you've got your stereotypical nerd with his large circular glasses who spreads theories that make him the laughing stock of the scientific community, until an older person comes and brings him into a scientific project that he alone has the knowledge of surrounding symbols and language. He's surrounded by a crew of people that don't respect him and make fun of him (because its the 90s/early 2000s and nerds were lovable goof balls, not arrogant assholes who probably end up being the bad guy, but also probably played by James Spader). They meet the native population and our nerd main character falls in love with the daughter of a chief or something. But there's a military person on the exploration team with an ulterior motive besides exploration and getting home. Shenanigans, shenanigans, they get into a couple of scrapes, and the movie ends with the crew respecting the nerd and him staying behind with his new native love. Oh also they both have a special pendent that helps them.

I basically described beat for beat the plot of Stargate and Atlantis: The Lost Empire. Feel free to skip Stargate and go straight for the failed animated Disney flick, it does this story better.

Apart of me really wants nothing to do with Stargate after watching this boring movie, but another part of me wants to delve a little bit into the television series that came after this because they seemed to be at least a little bit successful.

Like I said, I used to catch episodes of this show when I was younger and had no idea what it was about. It just looked cool. I had no idea that these were the same characters as the movie just with Richard Dean Anderson as Jack O'Neal and Michael Shanks as Daniel Jackson. There is clearly a larger world that this movie could uncover and maybe it was just a property that worked better as a television series rather than a movie. There's talk of a new though probably unlikely Stargate reboot.

Overall, it's just not a property I'm interested in. Even after watching the movie, I still am not totally sure what the whole deal behind Stargate is and I'm still not sure. Maybe I'll check out the TV show when I'm really bored and have nothing else to look into, but with no concrete future for the franchise, maybe it's best to leave it at the fact that this movie was really boring with one or two great moments from Kurt Russell kind of phoning it in. But hey... at least we got Independence Day from this movie right?

But those are my thoughts on Stargate. If you're a huge Stargate fan, please explain to me the appeal in this movie or TV series. I don't mean to be condescending but I can't help but be overall incredibly indifferent to the franchise. Explain to me what I'm missing. Otherwise, send me your thoughts on the movie and let me know what else is on your mind in the comment section below. You can also send me your thoughts on Twitter @MovieSymposium as well as requests for films I should review in the future. If you follow me on Twitter, you can get updates on future movie news and reviews coming out of this blog.

Thanks, I'll see you next time.