Overall Rating
 Awesome: 12.04%
Worth A Look: 31.48%
Average: 25%
Pretty Bad: 8.33%
Total Crap: 23.15%
5 reviews, 78 user ratings
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| Stargate |
by Scott Weinberg
"Too much sand, not enough stars."
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Apparently, all life on earth is evolved from this one nasty alien who built the pyramids thousands of years ago. Wait. No, the nasty alien enslaved all the humans, then built a Stargate and took off when things got hot. No, wait. James Spader and Kurt Russell wander around in the desert shooting at alien dog guys. Yeah, that's it.It's unfortunate that the payoffs here aren't as solid as the buildups. Roland Emmerich's Stargate starts out fairly strong, as we're shown how an ancient artifact found in the desert may be a gate to another world. The scientists and military leaders all struggle to make sense of it and then decide to just leap on into it. A group of soldiers and Spader the scientist get all geared up to go, and the script does a good job of getting the audience excited for the trip.
Then they go through the gate.
They end up in Egypt... I think. It's just a huge desert planet with a few temples and some dry skinny people. These poor souls are enslaved by the sun god Ra, and they're damned servile. (Only it's not really Ra, but this ancient alien who leaps from planet to planet and... forget it. He also has a bunch of burly henchmen who wear dog helmets.) The slave guys are all pretty nice, and one of them is pretty so Spader has sex with her. Now our group of travelers must find a way to decipher the gate, free the slaves from bondage, deal with pseudo-Ra, get back home, and maybe try to squeeze a little more interstellar screwin' in.
The main problem with Stargate is not with set-up, but with execution. After a while you feel like you're just watching weird people staggering around a desert. Except for the villains' cool Egypto-masks and some big ugly yak-creatures, there's not really much evidence that we aren't in Las Vegas. Also, the screenplay proposes several interesting questions, and then doesn't even begin to answer them adequately. What exactly were the pyramids built for? Why does this alien need to pose as a GOD when he's completely omnipotent anyway? And what is the deal with Kurt Russell's jaw all of a suddden? He looks like he just got his wisdom teeth removed.
Actually, both Kurt Russell and James Spader give darn solid performances here - especially considering how silly the whole movie is. (Example: Russell's character is mourning from the death of a son. As soon as he arrives in this alternate universe, he finds himself a cute kid for a sidekick. Neat.) Spader does another variation on his 'bemused intellectual' skills, and there's a funny looking bald guy who's head of the slaves. His performace was good, although it did consist of mainly uninteligible syllables and grunts.
One particular annoyance was that of Jaye Davidson as our all-powerful alien/sun god thingie. If skinniness and feminity were scary traits, he'd have been perfect here. They're not, so he comes off more skinny and feminine than scary and intimidating.
On the positive side, the effects are solid. (The trip through the Stargate IS pretty trippy.) There's also a solid action finale in which the oppressed and heroic fight back, although the plot holes and contrivances pile up quicker than the dead slaves.
You'd think with all the hype and money that went into this movie, maybe another $5,000 bucks could have been spent on another rewrite. Some really quality components are ultimately done in by simple muddled storytelling.
Artisan Home Entertainment repackages the flick for this "Director's Cut" though this version only features about 9 new minutes of footage - none of which are worth all that much. A handful of extras are offered in the 2-disc set, including a brief-yet-groovy featurette called "Is There a Stargate?"; an all-new behind-the-scenes feature loaded with interviews and FX info, a full-length audio commentary (same track as offered on the previous Stargate DVD) with old pals Devlin and Emmerich offering all sorts of entertaining tidbits; and the requisite theatrical trailers, production notes and filmographies.Also worth mentioning is that the theatrical cut is also included, though the extra scenes are so nominal there's hardly a difference. Still, I know several intelligent movie freaks who really dig this flick - and if you're one of 'em you should absolutely consider this 2-disc set a worthy addition to your collection.
link directly to this review at https://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=770&reviewer=128
originally posted: 05/04/04 10:55:48
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USA
28-Oct-1994 (PG-13)
UK
06-Jan-1995 (PG)
Australia
16-Feb-1995 (PG)
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