Stargate (1994)
Stargate (1994), directed by Roland Emmerich.
It's a solid, intriguing premise: a network of ancient portals connecting far scattered planets. At least one on Earth. Who? How? When? What danger and opportunities are waiting out there?
Critics did not much like it. I think it is enjoyable science-fiction action without much pretense of deeper meaning. Cliches: sure. Oppressed natives just need to get organized by our heroes. Take my daughter, please. Got to have a bomb countdown.
I don't know what happens to the mythology after this first film. 354 episodes across several TV series and I haven't seen one of them. It's a daunting body of work.
Notes:
Our two leads are contrasts but both likable: soldier vs scientist is a traditional conflict scenario in science fiction, as in The Thing from Another World (1951). Here we need both of them.
Kurt Russell is a suicidal soldier on a suicide mission, but he has our sympathies. That flat-top haircut is intimidating.
James Spader is the boyishly goofy Egyptologist who finds love on a distant world.
Chief civilian scientist Viveca Lindfors let her face age naturally and was still quite striking. She died the following year. Last seen in Adventures of Don Juan (1948) and Dark City (1950).
Jaye Davidson, last seen in The Crying Game (1992), is creepy but not very intimidating as the immortal alien menace. He had no interest in acting and did this film only because it was a big paycheck.
Mili Avital, the love interest, looks remarkably like Joanne Whalley in some scene. The village headman, her dad, is played by Erick Avari who shows up in a lot of these films and always adds a lot. Djimon Hounsou has a an early part as one of the god-rigged enemy soldiers.
The concept reminds me C.J. Cherryh's first novel, Gate of Ivrel, which began the Morgaine series. She has to travel through each portal, fighting her way across strange planets, permanently closing the doorways behind her and never knowing if the next one is the last, leading nowhere. I recall them as women's romance adventures.
Egypt in the 1920s is a prime inspirational node for SF/horror/detective stories. That would be a good study: those strange attractors that inspire so much literature.
Is "Kawalsky" a common name in SF military units, or am I just thinking of the Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea series?
The alien sky has three copies of Earth's moon and they never move. How weird is that?
I don't understand the "ring elevator" at all.
David Arnold's score seems much influenced by John Williams, with a touch of John Barry.
Available on Blu-ray. This has been released several times and remastered at least once.
