STARGATE (1994) Features Ra, who has a spaceship Here's a bit of a weird one for me. I've never been crazy about this movie, but something about it has had me see it three times to date, and of late I find myself hooked on the TV series. The movie's appeal for me is in its bizarre mishmash of sci-fi ideas, and of course the hint towards much more widespread possibilities, which the TV series would go on to exploit. But things don't really come together. A great metal ring has been found buried in the Egyptian desert, and it looks like some kind of sci-fi device, with all sorts of runes and stuff on it. So after 66 years, two men are called in to solve the mystery - a no-nonsense military man (Kurt Russell, introduced in an ambiguous-seeming scene where he depressively handles his gun), and a nerdy scientist with (natch) controversial theories about the pyramids (James Spader). Spader figures it out instantly - which is like 45 minutes into the movie - and the government team researching this thing puts it to instant use. And I mean instant - he doesn't even have time to get coffee before they use his insights to turn this thing on. It's a gateway to a planet in a faraway galaxy (yes, I know, all other galaxies would be a pretty long hike to get to). Just how using constellations - presumably ones in our galaxy - would help navigation to another galaxy, I will wonder but not ask. So Spader and Russell are sent through with a team of heavily armed grunts to see what's on the other side. Oh, and Russell has a nuclear bomb to blow up the gate on the other side, in case they don't like what they find over there. This strikes me as an irrational, paranoid mission, but that's just me. So on the other side of this gate, on this faraway world (the trip through is finished with one of the guys breathing "What a rush" - what is this, a deodorant commercial?), they find pyramids and hairy, slobbering alien cattle, one of which takes Spader for a merry chase, complete with "merry chase" music (David Arnold's score starts well with a great theme but then goes to cliché city at every opportunity thereafter - you just know that if there was a scene set in Russia, he's throw in that "ooooh ohh ohhhhhh" Russian choir). Then they find a whole bunch of enslaved humans who (natch) think Russell and Spader are gods. And maybe not for such a bad reason - everybody else who came through the gate before was a god. Who do you think enslaved them? Better question - what's he enslaving these stone-age, fairly useless people for? Wonder, don't ask. Then the Egyptian sun god Ra comes in a giant pyramid-shaped spaceship to kick some ass. See, this is what I like about this movie - its sincere, unselfconscious weirdo plot. Actually, a prologue in the director's cut shows that these gods need human bodies to survive in, and as long as they're in there, the body can survive for a really long time. Jaye Davidson - yeah, the chick with the dick - plays Ra, who started out as a stone-age peasant 8000 years ago on Earth and has worked his way up in life to the status of intergalactic badguy. Along the way, Russell and Spader make friends using a 5th Avenue bar (plug! Plug!) and teach a teenager how to smoke. I actually find that kinda refreshing; movies are usually so candy-assed about smoking these days. There's a cute female alien human (!) who's here mostly to fawn over Spader, whose charms apparently cannot be understood by Earth women but on other planets, he's like Yngwie Malmsteen in Japan. There's a lot of neat hardware in the badguys' hands too, like jackal head helmets that fold into themselves, cool fighter planes and rifle-like staffs. Spader makes a good nerdy scientist, but Russell is so stoic he's basically an android. Davidson probably comes across the best, his voice modulated into a menacing basso snarl, speaking in some alien language handily subtitled for the viewer's benefit. He likes to torture people (whatever he did to that guy, it didn't look very pleasant) and tell them he's going to destroy their world. For all the silly things I like about this movie, it's also the silly things that sink it. The plot - as is usually the case with anything written by Dean Devlin - is outrageously contrived, particularly where Ra is concerned; he hadn't shown up on this planet in like forever - why'd he show up now? Why is he so easily scared off, if he has the power to destroy worlds? At some two and a half hours long, an awful lot of questions call build up for guys like me who wonder these things. Nobody actually says that Spader and Russell are the Prophecied Chosen Ones Who Will Lead Us Out Of Bondage, but you just know they're thinking it. Top marks for production design and effects and stuff - directed by Roland "ID4" Emmerich, this certainly plays better than, well, ID4. But this is one of those movies with barely enough brains to posit some neat-o ideas, but nowhere near enough to follow through with them. I doubt the filmmakers had a TV series in mind when they put this together. I'm still waiting for more movies with the guts to suggest that more contemporary deities are aliens. Prince Of Darkness was great, but it was fifteen years ago! BACK TO THE S's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE